August 2021 A bit late this month, because we were traveling (!), but here are a few recommendations: First, you should watch Summer of Soul if you haven’t yet. I don’t think I have anything particularly new or interesting to say about it, but it is, indeed, extraordinary and absurd that the Harlem Cultural Festival …
Author: johnmfrench
July 2021
I’ve got kind of a miscellaneous set of things to read for this month, without much of a theme, so I will just get right to it: 1) “The Rotting Internet is a Collective Hallucination”, by Jonathan Zittrain Once a year, I teach a class on technology and democracy. One of the ideas that I …
June 2021
I’ve been reading a lot lately about climate change, and the environment more generally, starting with Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks. It’s a bit of a hard book to categorize; it’s partly a memoir about a couple of years in his life when he lived first on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National park, in the Mojave …
May 2021
I’ll start off this month with some music, beginning with this playlist by Jace Clayton, for ArtForum. Jace Clayton is also DJ/Rupture, and he’s probably best known for finding and promoting interesting new music from parts of the world that aren’t the United States or Europe. (I quoted from his book Uproot, about the way that digital culture is changing …
April 2021
Phoenix is sometimes referred as the most ecologically unsustainable city in the world. A city of millions in the the middle of a desert, it says something about what human effort and ingenuity make possible but also perhaps about how long impossibility may require to manifest itself. Needless to say, the city depends entirely on …
March 2021
I’ll start with some music: Visionist’s A Call to Arms is the album I’ve been listening to the most for the last couple of weeks. It’s a bit of a departure from his previous work in that there, you know, songs on it, but it’s still hard to classify. Parts of it are almost ambient, …
February 2021
This was supposed to be another shortish post about some things I’ve enjoyed recently, but turned into a sort of mini-essay on NFTs— a subject I probably don’t understand well enough to write about it. Oh well. In his book Uproot, Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) writes in one chapter about Red Bull’s sponsorship of musical …
January 2021 Recommendations
One of the goals I’ve made for 2021 is to post here at least once a month. One symptom of the vast malaise that was 2020 was having my attention taken hostage by the constant drumbeat of crisis and catastrophe. For me, at least, it was like having an eye glued to a peephole— unable …
Some Recommendations
While I’ve not posted anything here in quite a while, I have been collecting things to write about— so many, in fact, that trying to assemble some kind of essay out of them has become an overwhelming prospect. So I’m doing an old-fashioned link roundup of some recent(ish) things I think are worthy of attention. …
It’s Only Natural
As I’ve written about here before, I am often deeply skeptical of the way we use the word “natural.” I’m thinking in particular of the way it is appended to all kinds of products (food, beauty and cleaning products, and so on) as a kind of code for safe, wholesome, and generally morally superior as …