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 …
Category: 2021
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 …
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 …