Blogroll
- Critical Logistics
- Fabulous and weird website full of all sorts of info
- Geographical Imaginations
- International Transport Workers' Federation
- Middle East Report
- Object Lessons (on containers)
- Oceans Beyond Piracy
- Paleofutures – good tech stuff
- Port to port
- Progressive Geographies
- Sapping Attention
- STS Blog at Oxford
- The Funambulist
- Visual Complexity
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Archives
Monthly Archives: December 2014
Pulp fictions
pulp fiction n. fiction of a style characteristic of pulp magazines; sensational, lurid, or popular fiction. 1928 Decatur (Ill.) Herald 10 Aug. 6/5 Wood-pulp fiction commands a price of two—sometimes three—cents a word (The Oxford English Dictionary) I sometimes … Continue reading
Posted in capital accumulation, Middle East, oil, readings, war
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At sea on an island as a cyclone comes
This book is neither about ports and the labour of dockers nor about shipping and transport. But I have to write about it because it is one of the most stunning books I have stumbled into during my obsessive reading … Continue reading
Posted in literature, ports
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Train whistles and futures
I am reading two books simultaneously through both of which trains rattle and whistle and snake… But which in some ways are as different as they can be. Bill Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is a panoramic history of the making of Chicago in the … Continue reading
From detention to logistics
As I wrote earlier, one of the most amazing sections of Deb Cowen’s amazing book is about how after its closure, Camp Bucca was transformed into Basra Logistics City. Today, yet another article has come out about how Camp Bucca … Continue reading
Posted in logistics, Middle East, militaries, war
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How Railways Changed Time
I am reading Bill Cronon’s extraordinary Nature’s Metropolis. For obvious reasons, the chapters on credit, on canals and water transport, and on the railways are most interesting to me. This, however, came as a surprise: Before the invention of standard time, … Continue reading
Posted in capital accumulation, infrastructure, transport
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From Tegart forts to shipping containers
Christian Science Monitor reports that the British are building watchtowers along the Lebanese-Syrian border: “A lonely fortified watchtower built from stacked metal shipping containers, topped by a bullet-proofed observation booth, and protected from shrapnel and assaults by 18-foot-high walls of … Continue reading
Posted in construction, infrastructure, militaries, war
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The Gamming 