Links 17/7/15

Politics: 

Mary Kaldor on Greece and the future of democracy in Europe: 

But globalisation is not the only reason. The erosion of substantive democracy also has to do with what I call the sclerosis of the nation-state. There was a huge growth of states during and after the Second World War. We tend to think of globalisation as an abstract phenomenon that determines our lives. But of course, it is a social construction. Globalisation was a way of getting around the concentration of power represented by the state; it was the consequence of human action, of people trying to escape the often rigid and paternalistic hold of the state. This included the multinational companies who wanted freer markets and civil society who wanted more peace and human rights. 

openDemocracy: Momentous times for democracy in Europe, July 13, 2015

In The Atlantic, an argument that the newly forged nuclear deal with Iran "neglects the interrelated nature of Middle East conflicts" by only focusing on Iran's nuclear programme.

Pop Culture: 

NY Mag on Ta-Nehisi Coates after the publication of Between the World and Me: 

Coates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008. His view was less bleak then, less concretized by history. “I have become radicalized,” he said.

Coates’s quarrel isn’t really with Obama, in the end, or with civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. It is instead with the metaphors through which they made a compromise with the country — Obama as the embodiment of hope and King the embodiment of dreams. These formulations gave white liberals a pass. Coates plays with both these words in his book, reconsidering them, twisting them around. In the very first scene, he disdains white Americans’ “reveling in a specious hope”; later, he urges his son to accept “the preferences of the universe itself,” among them the preference for “struggle over hope.” The Dream became a controlling metaphor for white innocence. “That what your ancestors did doesn’t matter,” Coates explained. “That you went out to the suburbs, and the houses grew from nothing and it’s not contaminated by anything. The idea that you’re entitled to it, and people who don’t have it are either pathological or lower than you. That nothing’s wrong.” 

NY Mag: The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates, July 12, 2015

This is an absolutely horrifying article about Kim Fowley. 

A video for Young Ejecta's Into Your Heart. 

On July 14, we are to clear the last of the big hills. After a journey of nine and a half years and three billion miles, the New Horizons spacecraft is to go past Pluto, once the ninth and outermost planet, the last of the known worlds to be explored. This is the beginning of the end of a phase of human exploration. The crawling-out-of-our-cradle-and-looking-around part is over. 

The New York Times: Reaching Pluto, and the End of an Era of Planetary Exploration, July 6, 2015

bookforum interviews Mallory Ortberg of The Toast. 

Herrman and Buchanan think the media industry is due for a reckoning. The transition from media hosted on websites to media built around social platforms is more profound than people realize, Herrman says. As more content is published directly onto Facebook, users will gradually lose a sense of who’s producing what. The most consequential journalism becomes just another unit of content in a single stream of music videos, movie trailers, updates from friends and relatives, advertisements, and viral tidbits from sites adept at gaming fast-changing algorithms and behaviors. Readerships that seem large now will turn out to be as ephemeral as Snapchats.
"I think John tends to be ahead of these things because he reads them as science fiction of the present," Buchanan says. "That’s a lot of what The Awl does now," Herrman agrees. "Our entire economy is just a giant science fiction writing prompt." 

The Verge: Website, Profiled. Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?