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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
First, some shameless self-promotion: I made an album, and you can listen to it (and buy it!) here: Moving on… There’s a well known Borges story called“On Exactitude in Science”, in which the desire for a perfectly accurate map eventually results in “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and …
I’ve just finished teaching a new class about cities, and one of the things that the experience made me think about was how the built environment of urban spaces is the outcome of a long process (or series of processes) that is itself basically invisible. That is to say, you can see what the city …
I’ve recently begun playing the game Nier Automata, which takes place (as so many things do) on a far-future earth where machines have taken control, exiling humanity to the moon, from which they stage attacks on the machines below. Describing that setup by itself doesn’t do the game justice; it’s beautiful to look at, the …
For the last several weeks, I’ve been working on recommendations posts that have turned into other, longer things, which is one reason I haven’t managed to finish one. At least one of those may show up here fairly soon. Here, though, are a few things I’ve found interesting in the meantime. While you read, another …
We were traveling once again last weekend, and that plus various work obligations proved to be too much for me to get recommendations up last week. But, back on the wagon this week. Song: “Sunshine on My Back” by The National When I saw that The National had released a new song, I immediately thought …
Once again, a Friday full of appointments means these are going up later in the day. But, hey, you probably weren’t going to look at them until the day was over anyway. Article: “Using The New Sim City, 6 Urban Planners Battle For Bragging Rights” by John McDermott Though the new version of Sim City …