Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today? — “Social Skills Training”1 These are the first questions I received after giving a virtual talk on my book Climate Lyricism: Aren’t the…
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Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
“Of course, the world continues to end”: Weather and the Climate Crisis Ordinary
The sense of slow-motion apocalypse indexed in my title, spoken by a character in Jenny Offill’s 2020 novel Weather, resonates widely. In early 2020 — just a few weeks before…
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Dyspossession: Notes on the Black Commons
In the abolitionist radical David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, he offers an anecdote about the difficulties Black people in the United States have acquiring…
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Tim Kaine’s Orange; or, Stuck in Traffic
Last January, in yet another sign, perhaps, of the shifting weather patterns and intensified storm systems caused by global warming, a fierce snowstorm stranded hundreds of motorists along a 50-mile…
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Stuck with Each Other: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora is many things, but you might, if you’re very irritated, characterize it as a very long book about how hard it is to be…
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Icebound, Not Down
An icebound ship is a stuck ship — or so Heroic Age polar exploration accounts would have it. The best-known facts about the best-known historical polar expeditions (the Northwest Passage…
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Stuck in the Future (of the Past)
When I started writing this, in mid-June of 2022, it was 100 degrees in central Illinois. A “heat dome” had settled over much of the United States — it was…
Contemporaries Essays, Stuckness
Introduction to Stuckness
Stuckness might be the prevailing affect of late modernity. In contrast to the humanities’ valorization of sustained attention to the nuance of textuality, or to the accelerated demands on our…
Contemporaries Essays, Heteropessimism
Contemporaries Essays, Heteropessimism
The Age of Anesthesia
Heterosexuality is undergoing a major public relations crisis. From Gallup polls proclaiming Gen Z as the “queerest generation ever” to reactionary pundits inveighing against the death of traditional family values,…