Stacey Balkan

Death in the Air | Joyce Carol Oates In Murderland, Caroline Fraser traces the correlations between rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers.

www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Have others read Murderland?

Lights Out | Jonathan Mingle For anyone concerned that the world is hurtling toward three degrees of warming by the end of the century—a future described as “hellish” by the UN

www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Suddenly, Jamaica | Henry Louis Gates Jr. Jamaica Kincaid’s commanding, irreverent work immerses her readers in a black world without explaining or defining its blackness. This seems to be a major departure in the history of African American ...

www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

A beautiful and urgent essay, and a reminder: as you prepare your syllabi, particularly in Florida, remember the centrality of race and colonial violence to questions pertaining to energy/environment. Anti-colonial gardening columnist Kincaid is critical reading.

Bodies by Joe | Alma Guillermoprieto With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

As a longtime reader, I am pleased to hear of Guillermoprieto’s pilates practice, which has become an obsession of mine!

‘Trump Gaza Number One’ | Zadie Smith On February 25, 2025, the president of the United States of America posted a video to his socials, an AI-created vision of a postwar Gaza. To enter this

www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Zadie Smith on Fanonian radical humanism—urgent and brilliant.

Friends, please join me in a discussion about energy and equity for this wonderful UNESCO series! 8 August @ 6:30pm IST (8:30 am EST) 🌈🚴‍♀️

After seven years in this petrodystopian hellscape, where cyclists are basically hunted by MAGA/salt-life convoys (and "bike lanes" are sited between parking spaces and car lanes), I finally lost it and called 911 when a driver drove directly into me and fled! Assumed no officer would've stopped :(

Buried Sunshine | Jori Lewis When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, we lived in a house in the country—on a rural road on the outskirts of Springfield, Illinois, where the water was

www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Awesome! Thanks so much again for having me! The book is coming along nicely :) And re hit and runs: when I was hit down here, the woman (who thankfully only tapped me) actually wasn’t aware. This elderly motorist told the officer that she had no idea why someone in a bike helmet was chasing her 🥲

Another terrific episode of Biketalk—covering bike lane politics from LA to Halifax in addition to some great moments of this year’s TDF.

Opted out! The long game of AI is to automate intellectual labor and make folks like us even more expendable than we already are. They can steal if they want but I’m not loading the guns of the firing squad

'Cycling changed my life for the better' - Three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond receives Congressional Gold Medal Now 31 years since his final Tour appearance, US cycling star recognised in Washington, D.C. ceremony with highest civilian honour

www.cyclingnews.com/news/cycling...

🚴‍♀️💖 (but can we photoshop Johnson out of this image?? 🥲)

And Two-Lane Blacktop may be on the agenda this weekend :) (alongside Vanishing Point!)

Wow. Talk about petropopulism! Also, that soundtrack! Two pedals up :) I mean, so schlocky but also so satisfying. (and I just read the intro to your book too—awaiting my copy 😊)

Cultures of Energy: 234 - Failed States (feat. Imre Szeman) Dominic reports briefly on how your co-hosts returned home to their own personal Hurricane Harvey. Then (4:20) returns to the podcast to talk about his new book Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over ...

New episode of the Cultures of Energy podcast. We talk with old friend Imre Szeman about his new book Futures of the Sun and why energy transition is too often the story of failed states. tinyurl.com/5n6bp8b6 @cymene.bsky.social @imreszeman.bsky.social @uminnpress.bsky.social @4sweb.bsky.social

Save Our Signs Save Our Signs: Celebrate All-American History

Don’t forget to document actual history at the parks this summer!

sites.google.com/umn.edu/save...

YouTube video by Ram Trucks Ram | Never Stop Being American | Nothing Stops Ram

Also, this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1KC...

Watching this evening! I would also love more recs. The past few days have featured Spielberg's 'Duel' and Tarantino's 'Death Proof'--the latter super problematic and insane, but also good?? I also keep thinking about the moving convoy as a perversion of Mimi Sheller's notion of a "mobile commons"!

Bike studies research with my trusted assistant ❤️🌈 @bikesky.social

Tonight in petrocinema… @calebwellum.bsky.social excited to read this!

“No Future”: A Lexicon If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now?

Anxiety about the future is nothing new. As @mw-m.bsky.social writes, “Rejecting future’s seeming inevitability has defined thought and practice around the world, likely for the whole of human history.”

Our new series “No Future”: A Lexicon, begins today:

“No Future” Lexicon: Darkness Darkness often appears as a solely obscure and secondary trait of modernity; but, in truth, darkness impregnates and bolsters so densely modernity’s creative powers.

New at PB, Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte and Gabriel Cardozo de Lima examine how the “vegetal provides a clearer understanding of the complex values of darkness.”

“No Future” Lexicon: The Post-Post-Apocalyptic But what lies beyond the end of the world? Casting off the trappings accreted by the post-apocalyptic genre emerge stories of the post-post-apocalyptic.

“Without potential counternarratives, the post-apocalyptic imposes and reinforces upon us not a future we may potentially imagine for ourselves, but rather a monolithic vision that can only be blighted, impending, inexorable.”

The Long Fight for Tenant Power | Charlie Dulik More than a third of the US population rent their homes. The number of tenants in the country is growing fast—nearly triple the rate of homeowner growth

"A record number of Americans are paying increasingly large portions of their income to compete for a shrinking number of deteriorating apartments… With or without intervention, individuals will struggle. But it's up to [tenant] unions to give their response shape and direction."

Today's must-read:

The sagebrush rebel revival Dustin Mulvaney traces the current deregulatory bonanza that the Trump administration has unleashed on public lands and waters to the Wise Use movement of the 1980s and the Sagebrush Rebellion that pr...

The sagebrush rebel revival, my latest in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. thebulletin.org/2025/07/the-...

Opinion | ICE Has No Right to Anonymity

ICE Has No Right to Anonymity www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/o...

As a public educator, I am accountable to some of the dumbest schmucks on Earth; and I possess neither the freedom to speak, nor to cover my face.

Op-Ed: Katie Wilson is the Zohran Mamdani of Seattle » The Urbanist # Progressive mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s victory in Tuesday's Democratic primary is a watershed moment for New York City, and Seattle is on the cusp of its own watershed moment with the opport...

Seattle has its own Zohran v Cuomo mayoral race going on: A young charismatic upstart who actually wants to make the city cooler vs an establishment dinosaur who once pulled a gun on a pregnant woman in a road rage incident.
www.theurbanist.org/2025/06/29/o...

Senate Approves Trump’s Bid to Cancel Foreign Aid and Public Broadcast Funds

Senate Approves Trump’s Bid to Cancel Foreign Aid and Public Broadcast Funds www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/u...
DISGUSTED

Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere (Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, 2021) Pas encore de compte ?

New review of Oil Fictions!
stm.cairn.info/revue-revue-...

(The full text is also freely accessible!
directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.50...)

#energy #oilfictions @amitav.bsky.social @sharaerua.bsky.social @wordbird20.bsky.social @imreszeman.bsky.social @chiday.bsky.social @ashdawson.bsky.social

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