I somehow missed posting in September, so I’m making up for it with a longer than usual update. “The Death Cheaters,” by Courtney Shea Longevity House is a…facility? club? community? in Toronto, run by Michael Nguyen, who made his name (and his money) making very expensive bespoke suits for the rich and famous. It costs …
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April & May 2022
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …