publisher's (Minnesota's) description: Darkness is widely misunderstood, argues Kyle Parry. We take darkness as the enemy of sight, yet we can’t see without it. We call the worst parts of our lives dark, yet we wouldn’t be here without wombs, skulls, oceans, the moon, and other shadowed places...

It's official! Out this November. I've loved working with @uminnpress.bsky.social and @lpennywark.bsky.social a second time. www.upress.umn.edu/978151792214...

WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.

Rich review essay (in German) on my A Theory of Assembly, Legacy Russell's Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us, and Valentina Tanni's Memesthetics: The Eternal September of Art from an issue on memes: zfmedienwissenschaft.de/heft/archiv/... zfmedienwissenschaft.de/heft/text/vo...

Moten: "I have been studying how we can be together. I have been studying how we are together."

Israeli forces are pushing deeper into Gaza City as the full-fledged military ground invasion continues despite mounting international condemnation. "It's just extermination for the sake of extermination."

Tomorrow the UC regents are meeting at UCSF to discuss Trump's extortion attempt. This is a defining moment for the UC system, for public education, and for the university as an institution. We demand no concession, no capitulation, no cuts.

Excited to join v cool fellow panelists for the Curationist Metadata Summit on "subversive, unconventional, and unexpected approaches to metadata creation and use." I'll talk on ideas from my essay "Metadata Is Not Data About Data." www.curationist.org/news/save-th... 9/18 noon EST online/open

rich article on "DeepTok noise" animating "memetic ensembles that are purposefully out of sync"; TikTok as a "metadata machine"; (+ selfishly helps me link my diff recent projects, on metadata, on assembly) Noise in sonic social media: Memetic soundscapes of Deep TikTok Elena Pilipets, Jason Chao

maybe the undergrad class is a core thing (e.g. light) complicated (e.g. light not just x but also y, z) but also organized (e.g light in art = light as a, b, c, d) but also urgent (e.g. light as power) but also tangible/fun (e.g. light all around you) but also not the whole story (e.g. darkness)

recent reads: - Extractive Capitalism / L Khalili - The Vegetarian + The White Book / Han Kang - Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds / T. Halliday - The Invention of Clouds / R Hamblyn - The Left Hand of Darkness / U K Le Guin - Tyranny of the Minority / L + Z keeping it eclectic

Can’t put words to it, but reading/holding John Berger’s notebooks is moving, prismatic, fascinating. Also: didn’t expect to find him writing 11 pages of detailed notes on (from what I can tell) Isaac Asimov’s The Universe. Quasars and all. Bits in British Library for my new book or something else

Han Kang: “There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. Sleet falls as she walks the streets, holding this knowledge inside of her.” Reading now The White Book, having just finished The Left Hand of a Darkness. Works somehow.

Republican presidents get power and Democratic presidents don't. That's what the last four years of SCOTUS boils down to. slate.com/news-and-pol...

v late to this slightly awkward task, but made a webpage for the book kyleparry.info/a-theory-of-... my new book is now in peer review 🤞🏼

Not expecting a response but why not try. Anyone know what Cooper sentence or passage this paraphrases? In the United States, ['built'] is used with much more latitude than in England. There, as Fenimore Cooper puts it, everything is BUILT. The priest BUILDS up a flock; the speculator a fortune...

Moten: “The beautiful that’s inseparable from the terrible—that’s too nasty to be sublime, too flavorful to be in good taste, too syncopic to get fixed, too different to be one, too twenty-one to be nineteen, too then to be now, too open and close to be proximate—is what we share, in study.”

absolutely packed bus, on the way to Dolores Park, young kid with mom boards with sign that says Trump Has Small Dick-tator Energy, people settle, brief silence, someone at the front: “Way to go San Francisco!” woooooooo

writing about memes again, hope i don't blow it

There are now more than 2000 #NoKings events scheduled for all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam and about a dozen foreign countries. RSVPs are skyrocketing, which is particularly worth noting because a lot of people are very understandably dead set against RSVPing. We will not back down.

how soon

I will allow myself one armchair protest tactics take re: LA this rules

really proud to live in Los Angeles right now fuck these assholes, this city is great

This Rümeysa Öztürk hearing is radicalizing. I've been a court reporter for many years, and I've never covered anything like this: A student deeply committed to her studies, imprisoned solely over writing an op-ed, being made to testify under oath for her own freedom. Dark, dark stuff.

A generous 📕 review: "[a] ground-breaking and much-needed work . . . A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes undertakes the prodigious task of establishing a system of several shifting lenses through which many facets of the contemporary mediascape become visible as an interconnected whole…

Mahmoud Khalil “was abducted before [his wife’s] very eyes" and "disappeared,” says Ramzi Kassem, CUNY professor of law. Kassem is the founder of the legal clinic CLEAR, which is contesting Khalil's "baseless" detention and Louisiana transfer in New York court.

People need to understand that nothing that’s going on now will be “self-defeating”: it will have to be actively defeated. Stop assuming that the regular mechanisms of democracy and the rule of law are operational now. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/o...

baby rose's cover of landslide is really good

The looters I want to talk about are the ones who stole our safe and stable climate from us. Millennia of planetary harm for individuals' profit. They set the fires.

just finished The Light Eaters and am now going to need to find a way to follow the latest on the science of plants seeing, sensing, acting — it’s addictive

i like the lines these masts make

ethos pathos logos memos (memeos?)

“…in writing about the complexity of plants, he recognized the limits of people.” “…[Theophrastus] equated the liquid flowing through plants to the blood of animals, remarking that both flow through veins, and described the core of trees as ‘heartwood’, a term we still use today.” “But he was

100 pages into The Light Eaters, my dreams grew roots, reached places they hadn’t reached before, had electric charge signals to every scene, what if the whole plant is the brain

my phone, a cracked satellite, half mirror, chocolate bar, very flat friend, fiend, fun, awful

“Slowly, sleep was becoming a private and regulated activity: something one was ashamed of doing in public, at odd hours, or entangled with bodies other than a spouse’s.” - Reiss

light as a popular dancer: "Another way to think about this is to imagine that light is a very popular dancer trying to make her way across a crowded dance floor. Even if she is trying to steadily move across the floor, many partners may interrupt her path to have a turn to twirl around with her...

i like the lines these pearl peppers make

“…I am not always writing a sentence to tell a story, exactly, but simply to be in the space of a sentence, to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.” - Amina Cain

the eventual comedic edge of having the same nightmare an author just told you about hours before

_orbital_ has me seeing this puffy blanket both better and from further above

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orbital … !

copy a brown power on one bird in the 🌳 of the next player 🔥tūī🔥