Recently updated blogs

Nancy Friedman is one of my favorite writers on language, so I was over the moon to read her write-up of my book Gobsmacked! I can’t imagine a better appreciation of what I’ve tried to do with the blog and the book. Her piece also reminded me that, some months back, Nancy had suggested I write about “pap”–a noun for paparazzi photographers, and a verb for what they do, as …

• 4-star hikes • 4 mile out-and-back • Medium difficulty | Gain 1,750 feet • Sandwich, NH | White Mountains . Looking towards the White Mountains from the summit. Standing at 2,636 feet of elevation and located just four miles north of Squam Lake, Mount Israel's trails lead panoramic viewpoints in all directions. From up here you can enjoy sights that include Squam Lake and the ragged Sandwich mountain range …

Back in 2015, after having weepily documented the long, slow demise of storied record shop, Bleecker Bob’s at 118 West 3rd Street, I posted an entry about myself and my friend Steve having lunch at Miyabi, the Japanese restaurant that had assumed the long-contested address on West 3rd. Late last year, however, Miyabi quietly closed without a great deal of fanfare. I’m not suggesting there’s any sort of cause-&-effect correlation …

“Committees are an infrastructure designed to race you to the bottom of opportunity!” – Futurist Jim Carroll Committees kill ideas. Committees kill all initiative. Committees kill the idea of innovation. Committees are the destroyer of all things. Did I mention I think committees are a bad idea? “Let me check with the committee.” “We’ve got a committee looking into that.” “There’s a committee involved with the decision.” “We’ll send that …

In searching for a prototype modern hermit, one is confronted by the reality that after the Middle Ages, hermits in modernity were destined by authorities to disappear. In order to survive, eremitism transformed into solitude, and hermits transformed into solitaries. Unlike historical hermits, however, who seem so similar regardless of geography, culture, or era, solitaries present more variable phenomena. Life styles of modern solitaries depend more on circumstance and personality. …

“Nevermades” are a conceptual evolution of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” pushing the boundaries of authenticity and creation even further into the digital realm. While Duchamp recontextualized everyday objects as art by simply selecting them, nevermades are works that were never physically created at all. These virtual fabrications exist purely as digital constructs, challenging the traditional notions of art’s materiality and the value placed on physical objects. In the spirit of Duchamp’s …

Interesting map, from this paper. Blog moderation policy.

In this blog, I offer an autoethnographical account of what it means for TV scholars to take part in the conference continuum, which I argue is both familiar and strange in every iteration. Whether you are an ardent follower of certain large-scale conferences, or a serial “dipper in” to a plethora of small-scale events, you might not realise how to “find your fit” – when you turn up… Source

The Galileo Project's Papua New Guinea expedition "has culminated in the publication of a major new paper by Professor Avi Loeb and his team in the prestigious Elsevier journal Chemical Geology. Thus Harvard's announcement, which also details some "key findings" from the 1.5M dollar effort. The announcement retains the claim the meteor was "interstellar," with admission that some spherules were "potentially of terrestrial origin," and, while stressing the "BeLaU" subset …

Modern computing is just trying to keep up with all of the places where people have changed things for bullshit reasons, and fixing the resulting broken processes, until you die.

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.The thing is, I still believe that...

I’ve already mentioned Tom Harrison’s “Headline of the Day” email list, which is always entertaining and often good source material for Lowering the Bar items. I highly recommend signing up (email: tomharrison711 at gmail.com). I have an email distribution list too, of course, but HOTD can offer you similar entertainment in far fewer words. The cost is the same. A recent link led to the headline, “A World Naked Bike …

No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a profile of Nathan Cleary, the Panthers halfback, and veritable introvert: Nathan Cleary could have the time of his life, “just the most …

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in …

By Joseph Nechvatal. Suzaan Boettger, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) The 440 pages of the heavily illustrated book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson are Suzaan Boettger’s deep dive into the incongruous religious and raunchy roots of American artist, art theorist and literary essayist Robert Smithson — famous as the creator of the minimalist abstract earthwork masterpiece, Spiral Jetty, that …