New University: Makes Its Own Sauce

If you were to start over, how would you build a university from scratch? Would you keep disciplines, tenure, professors, students, and degrees? What would you keep from the current system? Taking a break from the End of the Newspaper, yesterday’s New York Times ran an End of the University op-ed from Mark Taylor, a …

Reclassified?

For our first three years in Montreal, we lived in a Francophone working class neighborhood, on Frontenac, just south of Sherbrooke St. The ad for the place didn’t mention a neighborhood, and we knew we were east and south of the Plateau. We deduced that we resided in the Hochelaga part of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Our landlord …

Villeray in the News

Several blocks around my home have been discussed on Spacing Montreal recently. Three gas stations within a few blocks have been razed and replaced with–wait for it–condos (more here and here). The condo-ization is a relatively straightforward process. Gas stations sit on corners and take up a lot of space yet run relatively low margins …

New Text

“Being ‘in the True’ of Sound Studies” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 2:2 (Autumn 2008): 163-167. I just used this in a seminar for grad students at Cornell’s Science and Technology Studies program. I wrote it in 2006, and feel less “stuck” about it than I did then, but the issue remains relevant.

Alep — Another Local Discovery

Across from the Jean-Talon Market (you could throw things at Hamel) stand the Syrian restaurants Alep (more formal) and Petit-Alep (less formal, same kitchen). We’ve lived in Montreal for almost 5 years now and in our current place for almost two, and just made it there for the first time Thursday night to celebrate Carrie …