Academic advice from cancer for the COVID-19 epidemic: let it go

Compared to the massive life and death issues people are facing, this is a tiny thing, for a tiny segment of the world. But with that caveat, it is still worth saying. In 2009, I was diagnosed with a very aggressive version of papillary thyroid cancer. I had to bail on my courses, and lost …

Some extremely obvious reflections on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

It’s all connected. Yesterday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I don’t believe I had any relatives at Auschwitz, but members of my extended family did die in the Holocaust. They also died because of anti-semitic conscription during World War I in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in fact, this is the reason my mother’s …

Is It Time Yet to Talk About the Conservatism of German Media Theory?

At least in the circles where I travel, Anglophone importers haven’t really reckoned with the political conservatism of so-called* German media theory. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has a few good lines on the subject in Kittler and the Media, but I have not found a systemic critique, and there is little discussion. At this historical moment, when …

How to delete Adobe Acrobat MS Word Add-in for Mac desktop apps

Just because I lost two hours to this yesterday and it’s hard to find this information online* hopefully this will pop up in the search engines. Search in finder for the file linkCreation.dotm and then delete it. Reopen MS Word and the problem should be gone. This works on MacOS Mojave; I haven’t tested elsewhere. …