Girish Shambu

Doctorow has coined some widely-used concepts, but his arguments have always felt elusively shallow and anemic to me, and this really snaps the reason into focus: It's because they're always and entirely focused on the consumer.

My (young) child now sees iconic pieces of cinematography or photography and dismisses them knowingly as "AI" because the model has been trained on these iconic images and he now doubts their veracity in advance.

Millennials known as the last generation to remember the world before the always-on internet, Gen Z to be the last generation to remember the world before generative AI.

Get in, losers, we’re flipping Texas.

Vimeo’s Massive Layoffs Are a Sign of Something Much Darker for the Internet Vimeo’s layoffs raise dire concerns about what happens to the vast archive of videos the platform has hosted for two decades.

Private equity vampirism eats Vimeo: slate.com/technology/2...

Really awful to see.

Pam Bondi just sent a letter to Minnesota officials saying ICE will leave if the state turns over its voter database to Trump.

Guess what? This has never been about safety or immigration. It’s a pretext for Trump to take over elections in swing states.

What a world huh Lemon it’s still struggling to be born

As 2025 comes to a close, I want to reshare the two issues I co-edited this year. The first is an InFocus of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, which I put together with Leo Goldsmith. The topic was science fiction and documentary, and included so many amazing essays. Check it out!

In case you missed it, Film @tcddublin.bsky.social & Dr Corey Cribb have a CfP out for an international conference on French Theory and Contemporary Screen Studies next June @tlrhub.bsky.social. Abstracts due in January. Please share with anyone who might be interested!
www.tcd.ie/ahss/news-an...

Forty years ago, 90% of media outlets were spread across 50 companies.

Now, just 5 companies control 90% of the media market.

This consolidation hurts consumers and helps oligarchs. 🧵

A Practice of Speculative Imaginings: On Sam Cooke and the Art of Utopia Sometimes in a moment of overwhelming emotion you hear a song. You finally hear it. You don’t just get the meaning of the lyrics, or feel the beats and the rhythm, but you hear the unutterable in t…

Rinaldo Walcott considers Sam Cooke and power, connection and promise in Black music.

An extraordinary loss of a generous and bold thinker

one or two best essays on SINNERS?

(bonus: an academic article - on genre or film industry or black cultural production or - that helps think about the movie even though not analyzing the movie?)

This Year’s Other Oscar Front-Runner Is Here. I Have Tragic News. It’s based on a beloved, bestselling novel—and it butchers it.

Since Hamlet was Shakespeare's longest play, maybe it's fitting that my review of Hamnet, Chloé Zhao's adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's great biofictional novel, is 2000+ words. In the words of the mopey Danish prince: "Anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing." slate.com/culture/2025...

On Monday, December 1, Columbia University Press will be selling all books at 50% off! (And some books at 70%!) tinyurl.com/7wzhyfmv @columbiaup.bsky.social

America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.

A wealth of talent behind the Hitchcock signature: Alma Reville, Joan Harrison, Daphne du Maurier & Patricia Highsmith.

Why Do Men Keep Saying Culture Is Over? Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, by W. David Marx, is a sweeping argument about our era’s bad art, out Nov 18 from Viking.

www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

Citation is how we knit the world.

The Inattention Economy Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economyThe Inattention Economy challenges the wides...

A link to my new book cover and table of contents. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

What Did Men Do to Deserve This? Changes in the economy and in the culture seem to have hit them hard. Scott Galloway believes they need an “aspirational vision of masculinity.”

Really thankful for this, from @winterjessica.bsky.social—a long-overdue corrective to an exhausting discourse. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

So glad you found it of use, Shelley! 🙏🙏☺️☺️

Volume 124 Issue 4 | South Atlantic Quarterly | Duke University Press

it's here!

FILMING CAPITAL

special issue of SAQ

"Visual and film studies provide a distinctive lens through which to unravel and confront the complexities of capitalism’s elusive appearance."

read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlant...

Favorite line from WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY:
“Why is it with the phrase ‘women’s writing’ we are led to believe that perhaps a rescue effort from our troops needs to be sent in its aid?”

In honor spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

Griffith, father of cinema.

Hopefully the whole Bari Weiss thing and Ezra Klein thing starts waking people up to the fact that corporate media is mostly populated with mediocre people who have made millions and gained unbelievable influence because they threaten nothing and tell wealthy people exactly what they want to hear.

What to do if someone you know has been detained — from immigration attorney Michael Foote….

Good Riddance To ‘The Best American Poetry’ | Defector When David Lehman, a poet then working as a book critic for Newsweek, proposed the project for The Best American Poetry anthology, he was searching for a national platform. His first anthology project...

It's the end of The Best American Poetry.

I wrote about the forty-year anthology project, poetry’s place in Big Five publishing, and editor David Lehman's culture wars vision of American verse.

defector.com/good-riddanc...

‘A cottage of one’s own’: Newly unearthed Virginia Woolf stories to be published A chance discovery at a country house revealed the three funny – sometimes surreal – interlinked tales, written almost a decade before Woolf’s first book was published

'Perhaps surprisingly comic.' As if the blessed Virginia isn't actually very funny even in the course of her most serious novels, not to mention the diaries, etc.

‘A cottage of one’s own’: Newly unearthed Virginia Woolf stories to be published www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

Cover of Fernando: A Song by ABBA by Kay Dickinson. Cover is a square shape and features an abstract pattern of black and blue kaleidescopic flowers. A black banner above the bottom of the cover contains the title information in white and the Singles Series logo.

Save 30% on #NewBook "Fernando" by Kay Dickinson. The latest in our Singles series, it outlines how ABBA’s mega-hit song could express support with anti-capitalist and Third World liberation while simultaneously becoming an icon of global capital.
buff.ly/lfEAK8o