I haven’t managed to get together a post in quite a while, so I have a big pileup of stuff. I’ve tried to keep each piece short, but occasionally failed. First, a few of recent albums that I’m excited about: Bolted, by Forest Swords One of my favorite artists of recent years, with his first …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
This post is more than a bit overdue, and some of these links have been sitting in my text editor ready to go for quite a while now. I’ll start with some music to listen to while you read: Song/Video: “Castrati Stack” by Tim Hecker Tim Hecker’s new album, Love Streams, has been out for …
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 …
Playlist: “Dissecting” by CFCF “Urchin” by Arca “Now is Not the Time” by Babe Rainbow “4101” by Roly Porter “Battery” by Fatima Al Qadiri I didn’t post a lot of music here last year. That wasn’t a deliberate decision, just how things worked out; 2015, in fact, was not a big year in music for …
I’ve given up any pretense of doing these on anything like a weekly basis. One thing that means is that several of the articles here are a little older, but in general most of them aren’t particularly prone to expiration, and I think they’re all worth going back to. Article: “Uncharted” by Lisa M. Hamilton …
Video: “Terminal” by Jörg Wagner I’ve written here before about my interest in shipping containers and standardization. I’m partly just fascinated by the idea that the whole world can agree on anything, but also by what such agreement makes possible— the astonishingly fast movement of colossal amounts of goods of all kinds across the world, …