I had occasion to read the October 4th, 1968 issue of TIME magazine (Canada edition!) cover to cover last night.* There is something magical about reading periodicals from another era, where what we experience as history is rendered as quotidian life, and you get a glimpse of how your own moment, as it is rendered …
Continue reading “UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time”
Lisa Gitelman and I will be editing a new book series on Duke University Press. As Lisa put it, we “share a taste in books” and we thought it would be a good place to support empirically rich, theoretically engaged work on media, technologies and culture. And yes, of course it will also be a …
First, the Cabinet event last night was amazing and a lot of fun. Also it is probably my first and only-lifetime appearance in Time Out. Sari Carel (my copanelist with curator Leah Abir), her partner Justin and I are talking about some kind of “Explore the Phonautograph” website once she’s done with her Semaphore Island …
“Constructing the axis on which disabled and nondisabled fall will be a critical step in marking all points along it.” –Simi Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” in Lennard J. Davis, ed, The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2010), 235 (originally in Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (NYU Press, 1998)). Today’s seminar topic was identity …
This month’s issue of The Wire has a nice article on the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (including a wonderful description of the dilapidated condition of the original equipment). It was the first thing I’d read about Milton Babbitt in a long time, which led me to go find his infamous 1958 essay “Who Cares if …
Continue reading “A lesson for the humanities from new music”
It’s quiet here but noisy in my head. I’ve eviscerated one chapter of my manuscript, which then collapsed under its own weight. And I’m trying to make the intro the best it can be. Intense. I have temporarily suspended my sabbatical “work no more than 40 hours in a week” rule to write a bit …
The SSRC just released a report on media piracy in emerging economies. I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t comment on the findings, but if you click the link, you’ll find an interesting discussion of the pricing structure as itself a demonstration of the arguments in the book. As an added part of that …
