Once again, I’ve fallen behind, so this will be a double post for two months. I know I’m a long way from alone in being worried about the current state of American politics. I could, unfortunately, being referring to many different things under that heading, but at the moment I mainly mean the intensity of …
Author: johnmfrench
February-March 2022
I presented at a conference at the beginning of March, and getting ready for that left me with little time to write here. So, I’m combining two month’s worth of internet. “Are You Sure You Know What a Photograph Is“?, by Rasher Haq This is a question I’ve been thinking about for some time—since we …
January 2021
A bit of a grab-bag of things I read, and found interesting, over the last month: Unearthing The Truth, in The Economist, is about recent discoveries in Great Zimbabwe, a medieval state after which the modern country is named. It was a major regional power and the center of a complex trading network; it is …
December 31
Getting this one in just under the wire, so that I will have fulfilled my resolution to write at least one post a month. I know it’s not an original sentiment, but this has been a weird year— one in which time has seemed especially elastic. 2021 went by very fast, but at the same …
November 2021
November 2021 I’m late for this month, and I have a pretty short list. “The Untold History of Sushi in America”, by Daniel Fromson (with illustrations by Igor Bastidas) explains how the Unification Church— whose adherents are also known, presumably offensively, as the Moonies, after church founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon— was a major factor …
October 2021
I’ve got a relatively short list of things for this month: Everybody is talking at the moment about Facebook and its problems— and some of the criticism is certainly deserved. But I was interested in Ian Bogost’s slightly different take in “People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much”. His argument is that there is something …
September 2021
Once again, a little bit of a random assortment this month: Video: “When Stuff Gets on the Camera Lens,” by Mike Rugnetta Mike Rugnetta used to be the host of Idea Channel, from PBS Digital Studios. That show used media theory and philosophy to think about pop culture, and somehow managed to walk an extremely …
August 2021
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 …
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 …