For reasons (all good) which are too mundane to explain here, I’ve seen more professional baseball games live in the past week than I normally do in an entire year: three major league tilts between the Baltimore Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and one minor league contest between the Harrisburg Senators and the Erie Seawolves. […]
A new phase of life
I had been told this moment would come, but I didn’t believe it. Until today. My days as “mad old bald zombie” and “the non-binary deity of spring” appear to be over. Barely an hour ago, as I stood halfway between the berries and the bell peppers in the produce section of my local grocery […]
Make your own holidays
I don’t know if I could articulate clearly what a “normal” way of using Facebook is — if only because there is probably more than just one — but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t match up very well with my own uses of the platform. I don’t spend a lot of time on the […]
Advice for graduate students
I’m a digital pack rat. The odds are good that, if I wrote something of even minimal significance on a computer since the first one I owned back in 1988 (a dual-floppy disk system running MS-DOS with an amber-screen monitor), I still have a copy tucked away in some folder on my hard drive. And […]
Representing Stuart Hall
Back into the archives this week, this time for a guest lecture I did for a large undergraduate class here at the University of Minnesota in 2012. At least that’s what my notes tell me. I was asked to come in and say some useful words about Stuart Hall and his importance to media studies […]
Unfixing the race
Twenty years or so ago, I tried to write a book about multiracial identity and media called Mixed Messages. For a variety of reasons, the book never happened. But one piece of the project did wind up in print as a journal article on Eminem . . . and there was a lecture that went […]
Being critical
Dipping back into the archives once again, but this time I’m pulling from the teaching wing, rather than the conference paper wing. This is the most recent (spring 2021) version of my opening lecture to the department’s big undergraduate intro course in media studies. As the syllabus notes, this course is a basic introduction to […]
Asking better questions
Recently, I found myself responding to one of those semi-regular “campus climate” surveys that universities (sometimes) like to do in order to take the proverbial temperature of the community with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s a task that I routinely approach with a jumbled sense of necessity and cynicism. The necessity, of course, […]
The problem with happy endings
Lots of broken patterns this time. This week’s post comes “early”: I’ve fallen into a Saturday posting rhythm, but it’s only Thursday, and I’m back at it. And the content isn’t some dusty old conference paper unearthed from back in the day, but a (Zoom) talk I gave just yesterday (so the digital ink is […]
Inside/outside
In 2008, some graduate students at the University of Minnesota organized a small conference on campus called, “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value.” Part of that conference was a roundtable on “The University and the Public Intellectual,” and somehow I got invited to be a part of the group on the podium for that session. […]