James

a woman is decorating a christmas tree with red and yellow ribbons ALT: a woman is decorating a christmas tree with red and yellow ribbons

Every time someone says “antifa”

Satantango has been sitting on my bookshelf since 2013 and I realize now that I have spent the past 13 years semi-consciously intuiting that This Moment was inevitable and would eventually provide the necessary justification for me to read it.

I will forever associate the sans-serif font Inter with exhaustion, hopelessness, and death

The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time

Happy to have contributed some writing to this T Magazine piece on influential magazine covers. Long live print!

One Battle After Another works because it doesn't feel like PTA is straining to have a Big Idea (his obsession with having a Thesis for every film is one of his only flaws imo)

airport brain

even the signage is suffering from imposter syndrome

and I wanna know why!

Any theories floating around as to why 1999 was the Greatest Year in Cinema History?

The Endless Week Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more c...

Looking forward to reading this

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington - 4-record set by Book-Of-The-Month Records. Recorded right before Ellington's death in the early '70s. There's an air of nostalgia in Hines's playing. One master honoring another.

Jonathan Crary, from Scorched Earth

Originally, the service had generated recommendations based on a five-star system of user ratings, but in 2017 Netflix abandoned this in favour of the altgenre-based system. “Moving from explicit to implicit recommendations was the big shift,” said Yellin. “Recommendations based on behaviour – what you actually watched and consumed, versus what you said you liked.”

algorithmic recommendation tries to make it impossible for us to escape our own predictability; continued interaction with these sorts of surveillance systems changes our relationship to our own capability to want things—makes it alien, fully externalized www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...

From William James's Principles of Psychology

Me: mom can we stop and get some classical music to relax/study to

Mom: we have classical music to relax/study to at home

What's at home:

Where's the lie

Marco D'Eramo, Empire’s Stakes — Sidecar Interpreting Trumpism.

Marco D'Eramo: "We should clear up the misconception, widespread among European opinion, that divides US political forces into more imperialist and less imperialist. No ruling class in possession of power is ever willing to cede it or see it diminish, let alone disappear."

The lost poetics of TV static, 1982-2002 (The Ring, Videodrome, The Seventh Continent, Poltergeist)

Intro hits good

Totally psyched about this semester. Students are as smart and motivated as I have ever seen them. We seem to still be managing to attract international students to Illinois, and protect them from government interference. Everything about the way I teach is changing, but that keeps life interesting.

Any great essays, articles, novels, or films about daydreaming?

Not a cell phone in sight. Just a nice walk on the beach. No podcasts, no FaceTime. Just thinking some thoughts and living in the moment.

My College Diary by Tao Lin August 5, 2025 – “I’m worried about what will happen when I’m done with this novel. Will I try to hang out more? But with who? The novel is my life now.”

"Memory is a mode of erasure that blacks out most of life. A diary is an erasure of memory—everything not written is blacked out."

One significant yet unsung casualty of AI image generators: this kind of bright/clunky handmade Word Art sign.

You: discursive formations embedded in cultural products regulate the field of the sayable and thinkable, conditioning and even constituting social imaginaries
Me: yeah man Deep Impact (1998) really messed with my expectations about what tsunamis look like

YouTube video by ABCLibrarySales Nationwide: Dead Kennedys (1983)

"There are plenty of people in the United States that would probably, because they need a job, or it's good for the economy, would probably work at a concentration camp." -East Bay Ray of Dead Kennedys, 1983

reading now. very helpful.

Best essays on Virginia Woolf? Anyone have suggestions for canonical (or neglected!) writing on modernism, stream of consciousness, and free association? Anything you'd recommend on Woolf and Freud?