December 2022 This month, I mainly wanted to do some kind of end-of-year roundup thing. I actually really like list season, when everybody’s publishing their best-ofs and favorites; I think’s its a useful way to round up the year, reconsider what you’ve seen and heard and read, and maybe catch up on some things you’ve …
Category: recommendations
November 2022
I wanted to start this month with a bit of catch-up, posting some things from earlier in the year that I intended to write about earlier but, for one reason or another, never did. First is a pair of articles from the New Yorker: “A Lake in Florida is Suing to Protect Itself,” by Elizabeth …
August 2022
I have a relatively short list this month, because we’re going to be traveling and I want to get this out before that. “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,” by Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, discusses the increasingly common use of systems that continually track employees to measure how much of their time at …
July 2022
First, you’ve probably already seen the first images from the James Webb telescope, but I for one am not tired of them yet. This tweet puts the “deep field” image into perspective . “Revenge of the Earthworms” by Moira Donovan The spread of jumping worms throughout the United States, and now Canada, threatens the health …
June 2022
The debut album from Japanese artists Hatis Noit came out toward the end of June, after what seems like a very long wait. It’s (almost?) entirely made from vocal sounds, manipulated and duplicated. There are points where it reminds me a little of Lisa Gerard and Dead Can Dance (the beginning of “Angelus Novus”, for …
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 …
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 …