As I promised (threatened?) last week, I’m going to start sharing a range of “lost”/ephemeral presentations here on an occasional basis. I don’t plan on making any revisions to the texts themselves (a bit of format-cleaning and typo-fixing notwithstanding) — and this also means that there will be citational shortcomings, since I have always edited […]
White Lies
My friend and (many years ago) former student, Wendy Adams, was kind enough to invite me to give a talk as part of the International Film Series that she runs at the College of Central Florida. And this seems like as good as anywhere to share what I had to say about To Kill a […]
Mic check
One, two! One, two! Is this thing on? It’s been a while, I know. And this post is admittedly not much more than a tease. But I’m sliding back into this blogging thing slooooowly… Coming soon-ish to a digital space near you, a new podcast — Culture Media Language — hosted by myself and Giulia […]
The joys of online noise [Rerun Sunday]
Facebook gets a lot of abuse. And it’s earned most of it. They routinely make privacy an opt-in feature, and then compound that problem by making it hard for people to find the right settings to change if they do, in fact, want to opt in. They mine our friends’ profiles for pix and prose […]
La plus ça change . . . [Rerun Sunday]
Going through some old magazines that should have been clipped and recycled long ago, I found the following tidbit (time-sensitive details omitted for effect): The public, as usual, is in a fog. If the [political party] and the media cooperate, the fog won’t be lifted until [. . . .] after [the President’s] reelection, [when] […]
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Film”: Version 2.0
Freshly online at Jump Cut, a reprint — with additional images — of an essay by Heather Ashley Hayes and myself on Django Unchained. PDF of the original essay can be found here.
All the news that’s fit to ignore [Rerun Sunday]
As I type these words, there’s a story about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests sitting near the top of the front page of the Guardian‘s website. The Guardian, of course, is based in London. Wall Street, of course, is in New York City. As I type these words, at the very top of the […]
Where do you want to live? [Rerun Sunday]
Like so many interesting things in life (or at least on Facebook), this began by chance. Actually, to be honest, I’m not sure exactly when it began. Maybe it was when I first created a “check-in” entry for a place that did not yet have one. Maybe it was when I first noticed a check-in […]
Fun with math: BP edition [Rerun Sunday]
Sometimes the toss-away lines in news stories are the scariest ones. The item linked above includes the following, otherwise unremarked-upon sentence in its concluding paragraph: The company has set aside $32bn (£20.5bn) to cover its liabilities arising from the disaster, which US lawyers say has affected tens of thousands of people in the Gulf, particularly […]
Dumb claims about smartphones
The Washington Post recently ran a photo essay dedicated to showing us “what [our] smartphone addiction actually looks like.” It’s a classic bit of public impersonal shaming that resonates strongly with what we already know about how smartphones have destroyed our capacity for genuine social connections. We don’t talk with each other anymore. We use […]