As predicted, I have been quite busy indeed and have not had a chance to post anything over the past couple of weeks. A bunch of fascinating stuff has been happening, a bunch of interesting books are coming out, etc., so I’m sad that I’ve been remiss in my duties. Hopefully this large batch of links will make up for that.
Apocalypse and After
George Dvorsky, “Have Humans Already Conquered the Threat of Extinction?”
Or not. Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander, “Limits to Growth Was Right: New Research Shows We’re Nearing Collapse.”
Jessica Corbett and Ethan Corey, “5 Crucial Lessons for the Left from Naomi Klein’s New Book.”
Eric Holthaus, “New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change.”
And who knows where to put this one: Alison Flood, “Margaret Atwood’s New Work Will Remain Unseen for a Century.”
Hyperarchival
Matt Frassica, “The Revolution Has Been Digitized.” The digitization of the modernist “little magazine.”
Randy Kennedy, “Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It.”
Glen Fleishman, “An Algorithm to Figure Out Your Gender.”
Patricia Hernandez, “Meet the Guy Who Spent Seven Months Killing Everyone in Fallout 3.”
Tatiana Danger, “Drone Discovers Abandoned Renaissance Faire Deep in Virginia Woods.” (I’d been wondering where I misplaced my Renaissance faire.)
Nicholas Carr, “The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project.”
History and Economics
Hector Tobar reviews The Half Has Never Been Told.
Tim Cassidey, “Historians Who Look Too Much.”
International
Masha Gessen, “The Dying Russians.”
Slavoj Žižek, “ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism.”
Michael Muhammad Knight, “I Understand Why Westerners Are Joining Jihadi Movements Like ISIS. I Was Almost One of Them.”
The Atlantic has a bunch of striking pictures in “Afghanistan: The Long Withdrawal.”
Literature and Culture
“Pittsburgh Poet Terrance Hayes Named MacArthur Fellow.”
Jonathan Arac, “The American Jeremiad after Thirty-Five Years.”
And indeed, Common-Place 14, no. 4, has a whole roundtable on Sacvan Bercovitch‘s American Jeremiad.
Andrew Culp, “From the Decision to the Digital,” a review of Alexander R. Galloway’s new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital.
Alex Ross, “The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the Critique of Pop Culture.”
James Wood, “Soul Cycle,” a review of David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks.
The Los Angeles Review of Books interviews William T. Vollmann.
An interview with Ben Lerner at The Believer.
Alexander Norcia reviews Ben Lerner’s 10:04.
Dwight Garner reviews 10:04 in “With Storms Outside, Inner Conflicts Swirl.”
Another 10:04 review: Christian Lornetzen, “Back to the Present.”
And another. Joe Fassler, “Envision the Novel Like a Museum.”
Tiffany Gibert reviews Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
On the scourge of “creativity”: Joshua Rothman, “Creativity Creep.”
Thomas Pynchon’s edits to his Simpsons script.
Chris Rodley, “Post-structuralism Explained with Hipster Beards.”
Matt Uford, “People vs. the NFL.”
Adam Atkinson and my colleague at Pitt, Dawn Lundy Martin, both have poems in issue 45 of Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics in its “NSFW” special issue, edited by the incomparable Lara Glenum.
My friend Rachel Nagelberg has work in issue 5 of Impossible Voice.
My friend David Letzler has a new essay in Hypermedia Joyce Studies: “Redundancy, Modernism, and Readers’ Expectations: An Experiment in Joyce Prediction.”
The Gaming Controversy
“TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.”
Ian Williams, “Death to the Gamer.”
David Auerbach, “Gaming Journalism Is Over.”
Patrick Miller, “Why I’m not a ‘Gamer.'”
Daniel Carlson, “The Insidious Rise of the Blockbuster Videogame.”
Peter Frase, “Gamer’s Revanche.”
And a roundup of the explosive month in videogames.
(Digital) Humanities and Higher Education
Brian Lennon, “The Eversion of the Digital Humanities.” A review of The Emergence of Digital Humanities by Steven E. Jones.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, “This Is Not an Essay.”
Malcolm Harris, “Not for Teacher,” a review of Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars.
Debra Leigh Scott, “How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in Five Basic Steps.”
Jeffrey L. Butler, “The Two Cultures of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century and Their Impact on Academic Freedom.”
Former Pitt teacher Cathy Day, “The Magic Building Where English Majors Work: Making Sense of Creative Writing’s Job Problem.”
Christy Thornton, “Students at the Barricades.”
Amanda Ann Klein, “Understanding Your Academic Friend: Job Market Edition, Part II.”
Mark Follman, “Idaho Professor Accidentally Shoots Himself While Teaching Class.”
And Mallory Ortberg, “Every Type of Email College Students Send to Their Professors.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 