Nuclear and Environment
Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet.”
Andrew Bast, “Unpredictable,” review of Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Nuclear Proliferation, by By Nuno P. Monteiro and Alexandre Debs.
Joe Romm, “Priebus Confirms That Climate Denial Will Be the Official Policy of Trump’s Administration.”
Natasha Geiling, “Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Deletes Accurate Climate Science from Agency Webpage.”
Madeline Conway, “Trump Threatens to Upend US Nuclear Weapons Policy.”
Sam Stein, “Trump Releases Letter From Putin Amid Talk Of Nuclear Arms Race.”
Robinson Meyer, “Human Extinction Isn’t That Unlikely.”
John F. Harris and Brian Bender, “Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?”
And Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui, “Apocalypse, Now! Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler on the Anthropocene.”
Obama
Ta-NehisiCoates, “My President Was Black.”
Barack Obama, “Last Letter to the American People.”
Cornel West, “Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama.”
And Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books.”
Trump
Zadie Smith, “On Optimism and Despair.”
Literary Hub, “A 90-Year-Old John Berger Is Not Surprised by President Trump.”
The Editorial Board of The New York Times, “No Experience, No Problem.”
Masha Gessen, “Russia, Trump, and Flawed Intelligence.”
Democracy Now! “Cornel West on Donald Trump: This is What Neo-Fascism Looks Like.”
“Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America,” including Toni Morrison, Junot Díaz, and others.
Jonathan Lethem, “Diary.”
George Monbiot, “Frightened by Donald Trump? You Don’t Know the Half of It.”
Colleen Flaherty, “Values for the Trump Era.”
Slavoj Žižek, “Donald Trump’s Topsy-Turvy World.”
Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”
Lorraine Berry, “Umberto Eco on Donald Trump: 14 Ways of Looking at a Fascist.”
Jedediah Purdy, “What I Had Lost Was a Country.”
Mark Sussman, “Trump’s False Choice” and “À la recherche du Trump perdu: Political Grief and Looking to the Past.”
Paul Krugman, “Seduced and Betrayed by Donald Trump.”
Dan Sinykin, “Hannukkah and the Apocalypse.”
Yves Smith, “Trumpism Has Dealt a Mortal Blow to Orthodox Economics and ‘Social Science.'”
Robert Zaretsky, “Lost in Trumpslation: An Interview with Bérengère Viennot.”
Michael Grunwald, “The Victory of ‘No.'”
Ilana Novick, “Intelligence Analyst Eviscerates Trump, Russian Influence in His Election and the Media in Epic Tweetstorm.”
Andrew Reynolds, “North Carolina Is No Longer Classified as a Democracy.”
Emad Mirmotahari, “A Letter to Muslims and Jews.”
The New Inquiry annotates a letter to The New York Times staff.
Amy Siskind’s list of subtle changes.
Pussy Riot, “Make America Great Again.”
And River Clegg, “Rant.”
National Security State
Anthony Lowenstein, “Hijack: The CIA and Literary Culture.”
Economics
Henry Wismayer, “The Crisis of Liberalism, Part I” and “The Crisis of Liberalism, Part II: All Policy, No Power.”
Rob Horning, “The End Is Always Near,” review of Four Futures: Life after Capitalism, by Peter Frase.
Pat Hudson and Keith Tribe, eds., The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The Piketty Opportunity.
And Larry Elliott, “World’s Eight Richest People Have Same Wealth as Poorest 50%.”
Social Justice
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Now Is the Time to Talk about What We Are Actually Talking About.”
Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-Right.'”
Ideas with Paul Kennedy, “The Dangerous Game: Gamergate and the ‘Alt-Right.'”
UpFront, “Slavoj Žižek on ‘Clash of Civilizations.'” (A quite incisive takedown of Žižek on the refugee crisis.)
And Sam Levin, “Arizona Republicans Move to Ban Social Justice Courses and Events at Schools.”
Hyperarchival
David Foster Wallace Research Group, “Bibliography of Secondary Literature.” (I’m in there twice! though I also have a short review essay that isn’t included.) Also, there is now a David Foster Wallace Society.
Anne Boyer, “Clickbait Thanatos: On the Poetics of Post-Privacy.”
Richard Montgomery, “On UCSC’s Outrageous Mass Destruction of Books.”
Leigh Alexander, “2016: The Year the Internet Became Real.”
Noel Kirkpatrick, “A River of Books Floods a Busy Toronto Street.”
Michael Enright, “Why We Still Need Public Libraries in the Digital Age.”
Leif Weatherby, “The Cybernetic Humanities.”
Josh Chin, “China’s New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything.”
Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan, “Attributing Cyber Attacks.”
And Mike Wehner, “CNN Uses Screenshot from Fallout 4 to Show How Russians Hack Things.”
Criticism and Theory
Mark Fisher, “On Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Nolan: An Extract From The Weird And The Eerie” and “Good for Nothing.”
John Doran, “Capitalist Realism Author Mark Fisher Dies.”
Fredric Jameson, “Badiou and the French Tradition.”
Jennifer Ruark, “Bait and Switch: How the Physicist Alan Sokal Hoodwinked a Group of Humanists and Why, 20 Years Later, It Still Matters.”
Arne de Boever, ed., “Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy,” special issue, boundary 2, with essays by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRivière, Mark B. N. Hansen, and many others. (de Boever’s introduction here.)
Patrick Jagoda, “Videogame Criticism and Games in the Twenty-First Century.”
Andrew Hageman, Timothy Morton, and Jeff VanderMeer, “A Conversation Between Timothy Morton and Jeff VanderMeer.”
Lisa Ruddick, “When Nothing Is Cool.”
Marc Parry, “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies.”
Terry Eagleton, “Structurally Unsound.”
Adam Soboczynski and Alexander Cammann, “Heidegger and Anti-Semitism Yet Again: The Correspondence Between the Philosopher and His Brother Fritz Heidegger Exposed.”
Aku Ammah-Tagoe, Christopher Patrick Miller, and Mande Zecca, “Letters from ‘The Contemporary.'”
Literature and Culture
Robert Minto, “A Smuggling Operation: John Berger’s Theory of Art.”
William Deresiewicz, “In Defense of Facts,” review of The Making of the American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata.
Being Human, Dan Kubis, “Interview with Michael Chabon.”
Colson Whitehead on David Bowie, and many others on those who passed in 2016.
Osvaldo Oyola, “Between the World and Wakanda: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther.”
Julie Marie Wade, “The Rumpus Interview with Dawn Lundy Martin.”
Sasha Chapin, “The David Foster Wallace Disease.”
Aaron Bady, “Westworld, Race, and the Western.”
Joanna Radin, “Where Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng.”
A. O. Scott, “Rogue One Leaves Star Wars Fans Wanting More and Less.”
Dan Hassler-Forest, “Politicizing Star Wars: Anti-Fascism vs. Nostalgia in Rogue One.”
Kate Aronoff, “Star Wars Goes to the Countryside.”
Morgan Leigh Davies, “Art in the Age of Masculinist Hollywood: Damien Chazelle’s La La Land.”
Ian Bogost, “Nintendo’s Sad Struggle for Survival.”
Lana Polansky, “Towards an Art History for Videogames.”
Eric Swain, “The Year in Videogame Blogging.”
Geoff Shullenberger, “The Socialist Singularity.”
Min Hyoung Song, “Monsters Come Home: On Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress.”
Zero Books, “Michel Houellebecq and The Liar’s Paradox.”
Jeannie Blue, review of Requiem for Hell, by Mono.
Alexander Provan, “Unknown Makers.”
Paul Celan, “From ‘Microliths,'” trans. Pierre Joris.
Rachel Nagelberg, “Two Poems.”
Humanities and Higher Education
Jayne Anne Phillips, “Why Teaching (Writing) Matters: A Full Confession.” In Praise (and Defense) of the MFA.
Will Schwalbe, “The Need to Read.”
Kevin Carey, “A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia.”
And “Professor Drops Lame Ass Class.”
Pittsburgh
Jessica Glenza, “Pittsburgh Water: Expensive, Rust-Colored, Corrosive, and High in Lead.”
Brentin Mock, “An Exit Interview with the Woman Who Drove Pittsburgh into the Innovation Age.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 