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I've watched Saturday Night Live from a frighteningly early age—I bet I've seen almost every episode live from about 1979 onwards, when I was barely 7 years old staying up late on Saturday nights to see some comedy.Before NBC launches into their 50th season of SNL in a couple weeks, I wanted to highlight my favorite sketches from the past season that I still think about months later. #3 DetectivesMy …

I was born in 1980, which technically makes me a part of Generation X; there is at least one data point, though, that makes me a millennial. In 2021 Fast Company conducted a survey about what constituted middle age; millennials defined it as 35 to 50, while Generation X said 45 to 55 (Baby Boomers said 45 to 60). For my part, I wrote that Apple was in its middle …

An Airbus 380 and Boeing 747, from Tom Hagen’s Lockdown Series, later a book called simply Airports:During the lockdown time in March, April and May, I took photographs of the largest German Airports and their resting runways. It was a historic moment and a unique opportunity to get these images.

Joan Myers, as she prepared to embark on writing her own revisionist history of the Arbuckle trials, saw that the primary sources, as of 2013, would be newspaper accounts.* At the time, searchable databases provided by the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and so on were game-changers for researchers. Nevertheless, Ms. Myers warned against relying on the reportage of the early 1920s, meaning, of course, that …

The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell. As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on …

"Check your ego at the door. No gods, no rockstars. Only n00bs." --thegibson I try to go off the grid every couple of months to get away from everything and free up compute cycles for messing around with stuff. For whatever reason I find it helpful to go off to someplace quiet, possibly because it means that I can be nonverbal for a while. It definitely helps with my ADD. …

Sasha & The Bear We’re The Only Following on from their celluloid-soaked epic, Something You Said, from September last year, duo Sasha & The Bear are back with new single We’re The Only. Last time we checked in with Sasha & The Bear, the pair had been brought back together despite being divided by geography. With Dov having moved to Tel Aviv, the death of his mother brought him even …

Produire l’abondant en utilisant des ressources rares Petite déambulation sur l’écriture, l’art et le productivisme Je discutais avec mon épouse de l’œuvre de Marina Abramović, une artiste totale qui nous remue profondément (que j’ai découvert il y a des années à la lecture de 2312, roman de Kim Stanley Robinson). Grâce à elle, nous sommes tombés d’accord sur une définition de l’art. 'The idea of a vagina stopping the rain …

Nine chapters into his book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies makes a little self-deprecatory joke. He had intended to write a detective mystery about cybernetics, he says, but has spent eight chapters describing the construction of the murder weapon. The question that Davies starts out with is about how it is that the modern organisation has become structured in structured in such a way that when bad things happen, to …

My Prized Possessions 11 September, 2024 After reading this post at 47Nil, my thoughts slowly turned to the items that mean the most to me. Even though I identify as a small m minimalist, I’m not against owning stuff. It just has to be the right stuff, and not too much of it. Most material things come and go, but there are certain items that stick with us for the …

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan by Catherine Clément:Lacan was […] a skillful rhetorician capable of translating the terminology of psychoanalysis into a language, other than “Freud.” (p. 44)This statement is a good description of what Lacan was doing in Seminars I-VI. It seems to me that Lacan diverged from Freud a bit in Seminar VII when he started to theorize the real as something separate from reality. …

I have a new open access paper in Economy & Society, co-authored with Sahil Dutta and Nick Taylor, on the rising centrality of ‘home’ to current political, economic and governmental problems.

Plan a trip to Rome, and you’ll wish you were there for weeks! From the Colosseum to the Vatican Museums, there’s a lot in the Eternal City to check off your bucket list. But if you can tear yourself away from Rome’s top attractions, there are plenty of excellent day trips from Rome. Rome is centrally located in Italy, allowing you to do day trips along the coast, further inland, …

Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz have written two screenplays, both unproduced, and both now published by Chiroptera Press. The first was Crampton, a 2000 reworking of a 1998 proposed X-Files episode into an original full length feature. It appeared in print in 2002, and was reprinted by Chiroptera Press in early 2024. (I reviewed this edition in this blog on March 17, 2024.) The second, Michigan Basement, was written soon …

When you build up a collection of notebooks over the years, it’s important to remember that sometimes the stash may not stay as well-preserved as you’d like if you aren’t using or at least handling them regularly! I was recently going through some of my boxes of notebooks, trying to decide what to use next … Continue reading Notebook Deterioration →