BY JAMES P. LENFESTEYExcerpts from the introduction to If Bees Are Few It is said there are twenty thousand species of bees in the world, a genus fifty million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning and no end to bee buzz. As Rilke wrote, poets are … More Let’s hear it for the bee.
BY CEDRIC JOHNSON (The Neoliberal Deluge and Revolutionaries to Race Leaders) AND THOMAS JESSEN ADAMS Excerpt from article published in Jacobin: The rains over Corpus Christi and Houston have finally stopped, and floodwaters are beginning to recede. Some residents are still stranded, while others — tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands — won’t be able to … More The Coming Storm
Image: HBO BY CORD J. WHITAKER Like the plot of Game of Thrones, memory resists standing still. And Game of Thrones is all about memory. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based major cultural, political, and scientific strides on the memory of an imagined, idyllic Middle Ages. One that moderns at times resisted as primitive and … More Remember Soup, Poop, and Climate Change: Veering with Game of Thrones
It is not to be expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending *** BY … More Book Ends: On writing, being, and sensing an ending.
BY ALEXIS SHOTWELLAssociate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Philosophy at Carleton University A politics of imperfection, a politics of responsibility. Lately it seems like every day brings a new bad thing for anyone not invested in white supremacy and capitalism. As the tweet went: “First they came for … More There’s strength in a politics of imperfection.
BY REBEKAH SHELDONAuthor of The Child to Come “Maybe it would be better not to survive.” That’s my favorite line from The Child to Come though I didn’t write it. It is spoken by Camilla Del Ray, a military woman and computer specialist from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s accidental colonization novel Darkover Landfall (1972), after learning … More Save Us.
Karen Pinkus is author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary, which is an idiosyncratic, speculative dictionary of fuels, real and imagined, historical and futuristic, hopeless and utopian. From “Air” to “Zyklon B,” entries in this unusual dictionary include Algae, Clathrates, Dilithium, Fleece, Goats, Theology, Whale Oil, and many, many more. This dictionary can help scramble our … More Fuel vs. energy: A new narrative, from A to Z
BY STACY ALAIMOUniversity of Texas at Arlington The final weeks of the 2016 U.S. presidential election have become a lewd circus. Complex, urgent issues such as climate change have been upstaged by rude outbursts—“you’re a puppet!,”“such a nasty woman.” It is difficult to imagine these scenes could have anything at all to do with climate … More Climate change, carbon-heavy masculinity, and the politics of exposure
Photo courtesy of the author. BY ALEX V. BARNARDFood justice activist and doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley Whole Foods felt the wrath of the Twitter-sphere this month. The episode started with consumers questioning the company’s ethical bona-fides but, in the end, cast into doubt the effectiveness of “ethical consumerism” itself. … More On freegans, pre-peeled oranges, and ethical consumer ‘Whack-A-Mole’
BY JENNIFER GABRYSReader in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London Planetary computerization—and the making of a computational planet—are terms and concepts that now occupy considerable attention in media studies and environmental theory and practice. Yet these developments have been underway since at least the post-war context, since renderings of the planet as expressed through communication … More The Internet of Things and the rise of planetary computerization: How environmental sensing technologies multiply rather than consolidate versions of the planet.
