Gavin Mueller

I really hate how much the celebrity gossip has been incorporated into pop music, i associate this with swift but also kanye as he was falling off, and, while autobiography has been in lyrics for a long time, I mark Eminem as the inflection point to total TMZization

mogging everyone at the gym by reading Minima Moralia on the elliptical machine

What's the best part of being a member of the PMC? Hard to choose, but for me it's probably when I extend cultural and technological hegemony over the working class

This translation of Adorno's late essay "Commitment" (which I've assigned to students) has a lot of footnotes, many dedicated to defining terms, that appear to me to be straight-up incorrect unhistoricacts.net/wp-content/u...

That’s probably why we can’t have cats, it would just be too entertaining

No, but we did have a mouse, which was very exciting

Animal-human scientist Maarten Reesink: “I am a cat, born in a human body”

Interview with my officemate www.folia.nl/en/wetenscha...

incredible! important and brave work, much respect!

NEW: Two Unpublished Fragments (On The Tasks of Post-War Marxism) by Horkheimer & Adorno (1946)

- On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party
- The Curse of Writing Today

ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA...

Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett · Sexuality and Solitude A few years ago, we discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem...

Not sure I've seen Foucault lay out his entire research program and approach so clearly in anything else I've read www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...

sausages in germany are my son's proustian madeline

"For the majority of the population, to become an economic
subject means no more than being compelled to manage declining wages and income, precarity, unemployment, and poverty in the same way one would manage a corporate balance-sheet." - Maurizio Lazzarato

Today in seminar I drew a contrast between the notion of the subject in Descartes and Spinoza... I pointed out that they lived simultaneously, here in the Netherlands. That's what happens when you let in foreign refugees -- an intellectual golden age

🙏

Did you edit him too? Definitely an experience

Tuesday briefing: The online origins of ‘Boriswave’, the right’s favourite new phrase In today’s newsletter: How a term created by the extremely online right made it into the mainstream press – and a major speech by Nigel Farage

Last week I had a bit in @theguardian.com about how rhetoric provides a vocabulary for people to think/argue with. Here's my colleague @robtoes.bsky.social explaining how exactly that was done by online reactionaries inventing 'Boriswave'. Read & learn.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

is it ok to keep my gmail avatar the same self-portrait of Gustave Courbet I've had for 20 years?

Mood

have always found "real abstraction" somewhat reductive (trying to give it a chance in the coming months), but ASR's instinct that Marx is fundamentally doing an anthropology is spot on. i also find myself unable to quit kant completely so having historical materialist reasons for this is satisfying

perfect timing, i've been reading ASR

Syllabus for my Marxist theory seminar

Best rundowns on the white nationalist riot in Den Haag this weekend? Dutch or English

It’s interesting what pieces of American slang remain lodged in the Dutch vernacular. You still see “pimp” used to mean “decorate” and people still refer to something cool as “fat”

Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI Visual artists, illustrators and graphic designers share their stories about how AI is being used to lower wages, degrade work and even replace it altogether, in this installment of AI Killed My Job.

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing.

These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

Queen

Dopamine Nation — Anna Lembke, MD In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain.

the second passage is copypasta from the back of this very popular book. but i don't know about "reputable," it's a psychiatrist who specializes in heroin addiction and does not consult media studies www.annalembke.com/dopamine-nat...

Together with Marc Tuters and @robtoes.bsky.social I wrote an essay on the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Groypers - Nick Fuentes connection and the state of memetic political violence today oilab.eu/frozen-antag...

it would seem that they are mostly out already

The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. -Adorno

blessed to work in a department where i can say "looks like it was a groyper" and everyone knows what i mean