It’s that time of year when I’m busy busy with all sorts of things. Combined with the miserable weather (it got down to -11° Fahrenheit in Pittsburgh last night), some links have been piling up.
Environment, Science, International, Disaster
Rebecca Solnit, “The Age of Capitalism Is Over.”
Noam Chomsky, “The World of Our Grandchildren.”
Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants.”
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, “Climate Hacking Is Barking Mad.”
Sam Kriss, “Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space.”
Cari Romm, “How Three People Can Make a Baby.”
Alan Taylor, “What Record-Breaking Snow Really Looks Like.”
Hyperarchival
Conor Friedersdorf, “The NSA’s Director of Civil Liberties Renounces Secret Law.”
Julie Beck, “Losing the Internet You Grew Up With.”
Manuel Correa, “The Philosophical Origins of Digitality,” an interview with Alexander R. Galloway.
Jonathan Goodwin, “Is the Network a Brain?” a review of The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future by Andrew Pickering.
Gavin Mueller, “Trickster Makes This Web: The Ambiguous Politics of Anonymous,” a review of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, Gabriella Coleman.
Adam Chandler, “A Warehouse Fire of Digital Memories.”
Literature and Culture
“Evening Will Come,” The Volta Tribute to Tomaž Šalamun.
Stephen Maher, “The Lost Counterculture: Inherent Vice Brilliantly Depicts How Neoliberalism Co-Opted the Counterculture.”
Megan Garber, “Harper Lee: The Sadness of a Sequel.”
Jessa Crispin, “Don’t Do It Harper Lee.”
Zadie Smith, “Brother From Another Mother: Key and Peele’s Chameleon Comedy.”
Adam Kotsko, “Nice to Meat You.”
Janet Maslin, “In Layered Fiction and Wry Notes to Mom, a Cosmic Genius Distilled,” a review of The David Foster Wallace Reader: A Compilation.
Parul Seghal, “Fresh Terrain in Huck Finn’s Adventure,” a review of Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece, by Andrew Levy.
Matt Taibbi, “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize.”
Carolyn Kellogg, “With Holy Cow, David Duchovny Is Finally, Officially a Novelist.” (An interview with Duchovny.)
A very interesting sounding new collection of essays, Postmodern Literature and Race, edited by Len Platt and Sara Upstone, and including an esssay by Samuel Cohen, “The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace.” (Read a bit here.)
Stephen Squibb, “The Last Days of Football.”
Rudi Batzell, “Socialize Football.”
Adam Chandler, “America’s Ugly Super Bowl.”
Adam Chandler, “Exit Jon Stewart.”
David Sims, “Jon Stewart Is Going Out On Top.”
Amy Poehler should take over for Jon Stewart. Just saying.
Juliet Lapidos, “Wait, What, I’m a Millennial?” (I knew it.)
Alexander Tucker, “Video Games: Offered by Universities?”
David Sims, “Could The Legend of Zelda Really Work on Television?”
Melody Nixon, “Topical Poetry: An Interview with Jonathan Moody.”
Cassette Gods, review of NAH, Otheration.
Steph Roman, “Shadow of the Colossus: Boss Fight Ecology.”
Dan Kubis, “The Shrinking Power of Punk.”
Nathan Grayson, “A Game About Taking Selfies as a Skeleton. That’s It.”
Peter Schultz, “Artistic Movements’ Favorite Drinking Games.”
And The Raphael Parable:
Humanities and Higher Education
Sydni Dunn, “Where Do English PhDs Get Jobs? It Depends on Where They Studied.” (Indeed.)
Colleen Flaherty, “Closed Networks.”
Michael Mirer, “Scott Walker Thinks My University Has Fat to Trim, Yet My Department Is Barely Scraping By.”
Claudia Klein Felske, “An Open Letter to Government Walker.”
Conor Friedersdorf, “What HBO Can Teach Colleges About ‘Trigger Warnings.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 