I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I find the whole metadiscourse around branding to just sound patently absurd. Now, I’ll grant you that if a marketing exec were to have a look-see into, say, the “god is a lobster” discussion in A Thousand Plateaus, he or she might rightly feel that we humanities …
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
Lost as Morality Tale
Spoiler Alert So as you may know, I am a fan of Lost, an ABC series that’s been quite popular lately. On Wednesday’s episode, Shannon, an annoying white woman, sleeps with Said, a “strong silent type” Iraqui character. It’s network TV, so you just know because there’s a shot of them lying together in a …
A Theory of Academic Titles
Yesterday, a friend wrote to run some possible titles for his book by me. It occurred to me that I’d become somewhat opinionated about titles for academic books and articles. Since this is my blog, I’m going to share my opinions with you. All usual disclaimers apply and I realize this doesn’t work for all …
Profound Thought of the Night
Courtesy of Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, in his section “On the Eating of Meat”: Although human phenomena–whether attitudes, wishes or structures–may be looked at on their own, independently of their connections with the social life of people, they are by nature nothing but substantializations of human relations and of human behaviour, embodiments of …
I Like My Job Best
when it’s about all the stuff for which I got into this business: reading, writing, talking about ideas. Highlights of the week included teaching (which is always a highlight), meeting with students about their work. the meeting of an augmented reality working group yesterday (which basically functions like a reading group for the moment), and …
I’m on a Hot Streak
With new music. I mentioned that I picked up a bunch of stuff while in Pgh. I am in love with the new Boards of Canada. I love the faux-vinyl distortion and studied detuning — they glitch it up and mess it up and it’s still beautiful. As for Pelican, I think I like Australasia …
Mouse Song
Okay, so if you read the paper you’ve probably already seen this, but it turns out that male mice can sing. They just do it in a range outside of human hearing. So what you’re hearing on the recording at the URL to which I linked is . . . pitch shifted mice. Digital audio …