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 …
Tag: environment
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 …
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 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 …
May 26, 2018: Plastic Fantastic Ekphrastic
In “We Made Plastic. Now We’re Drowning in It”, Laura Parker’s recent cover story for National Geographic, the fundamental point— we make and throw away a lot of plastic, and this very bad— is not surprising; what she (and the photos, by Randy Olson) does most effectively is convey the scale. Because plastic wasn’t invented …
November 4, 2017: Mind the Gaps
I’ve never actually taken a Rorschach test— which I guess might be a good thing, if it means nobody has had cause to suspect that I suffer from mental illness. But I’ve looked at the cards, of course, and wondered how I would describe them if I had to. As “Bear, Bat, or Tiny King?”Deborah …
September 24, 2017: What is Lost
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 …
Recommendations for July 18, 2016
#agir Recommendations for July 18, 2016 It’s been a while, and I have quite a bit of stuff this time around. I’ll start with a few connected things, and finish up with some random bits. Unintentional Conversation: “Cities Will Have to Be Redesigned to Confuse Invading Robots”, by Geoff Manaugh, “Deep learning is Creating Computer …
Recommendations for March 5, 2016
I have a mixed bag this time around. I’ll start with this video, which isn’t really a video but a sound file with an image attached so that somebody could put it on YouTube. Because of a film I watched recently, I’ve been listening to Chinese music played on theguqin, a seven-stringed zither played seated; …