It’s been a long year, long for many reasons, but here’s a backlog of some links. (Some very good news is imminent. . . .)
Nuclear and Environmental
New York Times Editorial Board, “The Finger on the Nuclear Button.”
Rebecca Savranksy, “US May Launch Strike if North Korea Moves to Test Nuclear Weapon.”
Kaveh Waddell, “What Happens if a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan.”
Radiolab, “Nukes.”
Laurel Wamsley, “Digitization Unearths New Data From Cold War-Era Nuclear Test Films.”
Michael Biesecker and John Flesher, “President Trump Institutes Media Blackout at EPA.”
Brian Kahn, “The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information.”
Zoë Schlanger, “Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored It on European Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated.”
Cass R. Sunstein, “Making Sense of Trump’s Order on Climate Change.”
Laurie Penny, “The Slow Confiscation of Everything.”
Jonathan O’Callaghan, “What’s Going on at Fukushima.”
Bill McKibben, “A Bad Day for the Environment, with Many More to Come.”
Andrew Bast, “Unpredictable.”
Youssef El-Gingihy, “World War 3 Is Coming. . . .”
Taylor Link, “Democrats Propose Legislation to Prevent Donald Trump from Launching a Nuclear First Strike.”
Peter Maass, “Trump Official Obsessed Over Nuclear Apocalypse. . . .”
Christopher Schaberg, “Trump in the Anthropocene.”
David Farrier, “How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.”
Frank Heath, “A Prime Condition.”
Dan Levin, “A Chunk of the Arctic Stops By for a Photo Shoot.”
And Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui, “Apocalypse, Now! Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler on the Anthropocene.”
Science
Fiona MacDonald, “Scientists Have Confirmed a Brand New Phase of Matter: Time Crystals.”
Lingo Andrewust, “Parallel Universes Are Real and Will Soon Be Testable, Researchers Say.”
Trump and the National Security State
Naomi Klein, “Get Ready for the First Shocks of Trump’s Disaster Capitalism.”
Masha Gessen, “The Styrofoam Presidency” and “The Real Madman.”
Alberto Toscano, “Notes on Late Fascism.”
W. J. T. Mitchell, “American Psychosis: Trumpism and the Nightmare of History.”
Francine Prose, “Forget Protest: Trump’s Actions Warrant a General National Strike.”
Perry Anderson, “Passing the Baton.”
Rick Perlstein, “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.”
Colin Dayan, “White Dogs on Track in Trump’s America.”
Richard Beck, “The Syria Catastrophe.”
Elizabeth Drew, “Terrifying Trump.”
Roger Berkowitz, “Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
New York Times Editorial Board, “President Bannon?”
Gregg LaGambina, “The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.”
Robert Zaretsky, “Achtung Maybe: Reverence in the Age of Trump.”
Dan Sinykin, “We Wish You Great Harm.”
Judith Levine, “The Bartleby Strategy.”
Paul Holdengraber, “Paul Auster on Activism, James Baldwin, and the Horrors of Trump.”
“An Open Letter to Trump from the US Press Corps.”
Intercepted Podcast, “We Are All in Trump’s Hunger Games Now” and “Could Trump Start World War III?”
And Conor Friedersdorf, “The Significance of Millions in the Streets.”
Economics
boundary 2‘s conference: Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski.
Gerry Mullany, “World’s 8 Richest Men Have as Much Wealth as the Bottom Half, Oxfam Says.”
George Monbiot, “Dark Arts.”
Robert Seguin, “Farmers and Foodies of the Future.”
And “David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Capital: Volumes 1 and 2 Now Available Free Online.”
Social Justice
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization.”
Justin Campbell, “A Voice in the Wilderness: An Interview with Micah White.”
William C. Anderson, “New World Anxiety.”
Peggy Kamuf, “Who Has the Right to Move?: On ‘It Is Obvious from the Map’.”
Criticism and Theory
Danny Postel, “Moving Targets: An Interview with Tzvetan Todorov.”
Françoise Meltzer, “Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017).”
Robert Zaretsky, “A Philosopher of Otherness Dies When He’s Needed Most.”
Alexander R. Galloway, “An Interview with McKenzie Wark.”
Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left.”
Samuel Freeman, “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism.”
Mark B. N. Hansen, “Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?”
Simon Reynolds, “Mark Fisher’s k-punk Blogs Were Required Reading for a Generation.”
Tom Syverson, “Capitalism Is Despair and It’s Time to Start Taking It Personally.”
Roger Luckhurst, “Making Sense of The Weird and the Eerie.”
Dan Hassler-Forest, Ellie Mae O’Hagan, Mark Bould, Roger Luckhurst, Carl Freedman, and Jeremy Gilbert, “Mark Fisher: In Memoriam.”
Zero Books, “Capitalist Realism and Mr. Robot.”
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Devika Sharma, “Critique’s Persistence: An Interview with Sianne Ngai.”
Paul A. Bové, “Rita Felski and Alt-Critique.”
Salmon, “Derrida vs. the Rationalists.”
Robert T. Tally, Jr., review of The Birth of Theory, by Andrew Cole.
Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present.
Jesper Juul, “The Darkening of Play.”
Adam Kotsko, “Žižek and ‘the Left'” and “On the Coming Apocalypse.”
Len Gutkin, review of The Limits of Critique, by Rita Felski, and Cool Characters, by Lee Konstantinou.
“V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism,” in Victorian Studies.
Jayda Coons, “Unveiling Desire, Affirming Pleasure,” review of V21 special issue of b2o: An Online Journal.
The Freedom after Neoliberalism Project.
And “Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences.”
Hyperarchival
Sheila Liming, “In Praise of Not Not Reading.”
Alex Good, “The Rising Tide of Academic Aliteracy.”
Henry Martin Lloyd, “In Praise of Slowness.”
The Office Hour, “Refusing to Read.”
Scott Selisker, “Culture Machines: On Ed Finn’s What Algorithms Want.”
James Somers, “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria.”
Mark McGurl, “Feeling Like the Internet.”
David Golumbia, “The Destructiveness of the Digital.”
Patrick Jagoda, “Networks in Literature and Media.”
Peter Dockrill, “NASA Just Made All the Scientific Research It Funds Available for Free.”
John Seabrook, “The Invisible Library.”
Anotonio A. Casilli, “Never Mind the Algorithms: The Role of Click Farms and Exploited Labor in Trump’s Election.”
And “Announcing The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition.”
Literature and Culture
Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem: Where Did Language Come From?”
Jennifer Schuessler, “In a Walt Whitman Novel, Lost for 165 Years, Clues to Leaves of Grass“ and “Confronting Academia’s Ties to Slavery.”
Zachary Turpin, ed., “Walt Whitman’s Newly Discovered ‘Jack Engle,'” special issue, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.
Eve L. Ewing, “Why Authoritarians Attack the Arts.”
Amitav Ghosh, “Writing the Unimaginable.”
Edward Jackson , Xavier Marcó del Pont, and Tony Venezia, eds., “David Foster Wallace,” special issue, Orbit.
Deidre Coyle, “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me.”
Daniel Cohen, “Interview with Mark Greif.”
Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Ghost in the Ghost.”
Gerry Canavan, “Utopia in the Time of Trump.”
Sean Austin Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature.
Rebecca Evans, “What It Feels Like When Your World Ends.”
Ian Bogost, “Video Games Are Better without Stories.”
Nick LaLone, “More Than Affordances: Limitations and the Systems They Create,” review of Play Anything, by Ian Bogost.
Austin Walker, “Stories in Games Aren’t Problems, They’re Solutions.”
Graham Oliver, “The Field of Dreams Approach: On Writing About Video Games:
Tony Tulathimutte on the Future of Video Game Criticism.”
Salvatore Pane, “You Guys Are the Best: Friendship and Grieving in Final Fantasy XV,“ “Night in the Woods is the Working Class Fiction I’ve Been Waiting For,” and Kristaps Saves Madison Square Garden.
Brian Whitener, “Cruel Pessimism,” review of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, by Annie McLanahan.
Alexandra Alter, “Sci-Fi Writer William Gibson Reimagines the World after the 2016 Election.”
W. Oliver Baker, “Words are Things”: The Settler Colonial Politics of Post Humanist Materialism In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.”
Evan Calder Williams, “Evening Will Come.”
Victoria Newton Ford, “Get Out, Claudia Rankine, and the Horror of Black Hypervisibility.”
Dan Hassler-Forest, “Politicizing Star Wars: Anti-Fascism vs. Nostalgia in Rogue One.”
Lee Konstantinou, “The Yurt of Fiction” and “Comics Studies Comes of Age.”
Ajay Singh Chaudhary, “DOOMguy Knows How You Feel.”
Darryl Pinckney, “Under the Spell of James Baldwin.”
Charles Bernstein, “Lyric Shame.”
Megan Garber, “Are We Having Too Much Fun?”
Johnny Cook, “Playwrights Local to Premiere New Play with Music about Poet Wallace Stevens.”
PLINTH, no. 7.
Matthew Rohrer, “Mars Is a Stupid Planet.”
Jeanne Marie Laskas, “To Obama with Love, Hate, and Desperation.”
Michael Dowdy, “Poetry from a Year of Precarity.”
Frank Guan, “Why Ever Stop Playing Videogames.”
Robin Pogrebin, “In Walden Video Game, the Challenge Is Stillness.”
Ryan Pierson, “Too Close, Not Blue: Yellow Submarine.”
David Horvitz with Alexander Provan, “Ask the Stone to Say.”
Rachel Nagelberg, an excerpt from The Fifth Wall.
Gigantic Sequins 8, no. 1.
Review of Giantic Sequins 8, no. 1.
Mike Good, review of Better Luck Next Year, by Ally Malinenko.
Rachel Mennies, “Echo and Narcissus, Pittsburgh.”
After Happy Hour Review, no. 7.
Nick Greer, “Transmigration/Thule.”
And Owen Vince, Everything, Desire.
Humanities and Higher Education
Miya Tokumitsu, “In Defense of the Lecture.”
Thomas P. Campbell, “The Folly of Abolishing the NEA.”
Lee Gardner, “Why It Matters That Trump Wants to Kill the NEA and the NEH.”
“Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60.”
Josh Roiland, “A Shot in the Arm.”
Kevin Birmingham, “The Great Shame of Our Profession.”
Blaine Greteman, “Don’t Blame Tenured Academics for the Adjunct Crisis.”
Lee Hall, “I Am an Adjunct Professor Who Teaches Five Classes: I Earn Less than a Pet-Sitter.”
Nell Gluckman, “Universities Take Steps to Improve Working Conditions for Adjuncts.”
Alana Cattapan, “Time-Sucking Academic Job Applications Don’t Know Enormity of What They Ask.”
Joshua Eyler, “Against Student Shaming.”
Scott Jaschik, “New York Adopts Free Tuition.”
Yasmin Nair, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species.”
And Marika Seigel, “Action Items on Your Radical Professor’s Liberal Agenda.”
Pittsburgh
Anya Litvak and Chris Potter, “Local Firm Envisions a Nuclear-Waste Moat for Trump’s Border Wall.”
And Lucas Peterson, “Built on Steel, Pittsburgh Now Thrives on Culture.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 