Regular visitors to this site . . . well . . . if such creatures exist, they probably need to get a life. At best, my blogging habits have always followed feast-or-famine cycles. And so regular visits — especially over the past year or so — would not have been a worthy use of most people’s time. But I digress.

Regular visitors — and maybe even sporadic ones — will have noticed the site has a new look. The old one had served me well for a bit more than a decade. But the WordPress theme behind that look was limited to a four-column setup in the spot where I had placed cover images for my published books. And, as of last week, those grew in number from 4 to 5. And rather than try and squeeze 5 books into 4 columns somehow — or, worse, pick a “least favored child” to drop from the display — I jumped to a new theme.

The new book is Better Stories: Mapping Cultural Studies With Lawrence Grossberg (co-edited with Andrew Davis, John Ngyuet Erni, Carolyn Hardin, and Jennifer Daryl Slack). You can read a bit more about it on the redesigned “Books” page and you can download it — for free! — directly from the Imbricate! Press website. If you want an actual bound-and-printed copy that you can hold in your hands, put on your shelves, and/or give to your nearest and dearest for their reading delight, you can buy it (print-on-demand) from Amazon’s CA, DE, FR, ES, IT, JP, NL, PL, SE, UK, and US stores . . . and since Imbricate! is a non-profit, open access press, all the post-Amazon proceeds from such sales go to covering their costs and supporting the good work they do.

Also new are my fall semester syllabi: the latest editions of my “Freedom of Speech” and “Media, Race, and Identity” courses. I’ve never taught either of these courses and not thought that it was “the perfect time” to do so. These are always “hot button” topics, and it’s never been difficult to connect the material on the syllabi to relevant “real world” events unfolding around us as the course takes place. But — sadly — this semester feels even more ripe than usual to engage young minds on pressing issues of free speech and systemic racism. I don’t actually expect the day will come — not in my lifetime, anyway — when these will somehow stop being “hot button” courses. But it would be nice if — just once! — the world could make it so that these courses somehow felt less urgent (even slightly) than they had the time before.