The naphtha-deficient Calbee bags have arrived.

Dang, $1300 is a lot of money for a phone. Am looking into the Nothing phone, which is now mainstream enough to be at Best Buy. RIP my $200 Huawei...

the National Film Archive of Japan--a huge research collection w 2 exhibition halls and a library-- is hit with a 40% budget cut. Here's a crowdfunding link for anyone who has benefited from its screenings, pamphlets, library or amazing exhibitions. My own research could not have taken place w/o it.

fellow travellers, tell me your anecdata about taking long flights (11h) with newly broken bones! I broke my ankle again, and it seems that there is a danger of blood clots after long flights which can be pretty serious. (Putting aside for the moment whatever pain and inconvenience is involved...).

Related to the Lineage fire in Boyle Heights, this book on ideologies of "fresh" was a big eye-opener. Like "sushi-grade" fish, the term means nothing but is ubiquitous as a criterion for value & status. All due to the cold-storage railroad car, and now storage courtesy of 2 Morgan Stanley guys.

Shift drink: Reflecting Pool 1oz rum 1oz mezcal .75oz lime .75oz honey barspoon matcha muddled mint

Break them

Chinese consumers are "just very hypersensitive" about not being taken for people from an entirely different Asian country. Woopsy. If only there were an area of study full of new grads such as Asian studies...they might also have something to say about a "yoga event" on the Great Wall...

Lol.

I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend, Emi Koyama (@eminism.org). She was a tremendous activist and prolific writer whose work spanned many fields and impacted many in the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere. Emi was a person with extraordinary warmth. Thank you for everything, Emi.

Does he not expect to be here for July 4, so has opted to celebrate the US's birthday weeks early? Inquiring minds want to know.

The last time the Knicks won it all, the president resigned the following year. Just saying.

Getting some really creative essays when I ask students to localize the TV series "The Solitary Gourmet" to their neighborhood or town...where Goro is a salesman who pops out of the subway, has a boring meeting, and is overtaken by hunger...ln many essays, tho, Goro does not take public transit.

Masamura's 1958 avant-garde _Giants & Toys_ about the "caramel cage" and Japanese media society continues to hit with students. This weekend, I lucked into a previous version of a featured song that had long eluded me (most anyone AFAIK)--"Be baba leba," with Dizzy Gillespie, feat. Helen Humes.

Books were hung by ropes from a tree at JD Vance’s residence to promote Usha Vance’s summer reading initiative

Truly asinine report. Just, barf. But it's good to have all the purgery in one place, senior scholars making shit up to justify streamlining budgets and student futures to fit their thin ideal of "universal" values, purging anyone who doesn't revere their criteria. Truly a disturbing monoculture.

poster session day with lots of gorgeous and personal handiwork from my Japanese Food in Lit & Film students: "disappearing" food in Grave of the Fireflies, JPN tableware, takenoko recipes, "Why Ghibli Food Feels Like Home," namagashi sweets, "Celebrity Food Ads in the Edo Period"...amazing stuff!!!

“There may be.” FFS. Forget the flags. I have a literal masters degree in public health, I’m an actual union leader (in my second term as chapter president,) I’m a college professor, and a reproductive health advocate. And people are quibbling over if he abused his exes enough to be disqualifying.

thanks to the Voters' Choice Act, between LA, Ventura, Riverside and Orange counties, you can drop your ballot at a vote center at any of these. I had a special frisson of delight not voting for Oathkeeper Chad Bianco for anything at a public library in Riverside. More counties' sharing plans here:

The public library is a reliable place for voting boxes. Do *not* mail. All your hard won voting machinations will be lost... this one was a real slog...

Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead.

Harry Caudill, a small-town KY lawyer, wrote a book that is the prototype for Hillbilly Elegy, if Vance had a conscience. It's about company towns, the Feds, and dependency theory in vernacular style. It sparked LBJ's War on Poverty. When I type "Harry Caudill" into Worldcat, lookit what comes up.

hive mind of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, any good stuff on hair? I'm on my hair stylist's PhD committee, as she gets a degree & opens a cosmetology school. She's doing cool work on obsolete licensing & curricula of state boards, not updated since the 1960s, all on white hair. Looking for epigraphs.

Citizens' Bank is the 20th largest in the US, acc to this piece. Its High Yield savings accts have been a popular choice. "Citizens, whose parent company is based in Providence, R.I., has provided some $2.5 billion in financing to CoreCivic and GEO Group, ICE contractors." So, time to get out.

Ruh roh. $2500 per instance at "multiple campuses" sounds like it could add up. Student journalists (Daily Cal here) FTW!

to say the quiet part out loud: most PhD programs fund grad students with a mix of fellowships and teaching, but mostly through teaching. if TAs are replaced by AI, most PhD programs will cease to exist

my Canvas now has Slack and will do an MP3 of my syllabus at student request 🙃. I would prefer an end of year chocolate cake spray-painted with my favorite scene from Spirited Away, actually...

I could have used a few more "people" in cardigans, but this is very on the mark. I liked how screen accessed by clicking through the module for "Learning Objectives: Identify the beginning of the end of human primacy" loaded halfway off the screen and was due yesterday; lolsob.

i think the actual first step in making higher education more accessible is building more universities www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/u...

so I saw Ultike Ottinger's epic film _Taiga_ yesterday, in a theatre. the last shot was depressing--a little girl riding a merry go round reindeer in a theme park, when people used to ride real ones. but also singing and music--inc. an instrument that was a cross between a dulcimer and a koto...

This is unfortunate. Our tax system is so baroque and weird. It should not cost you MORE money to give a portion of your money to the govt.

as luck would have it, Ulrike Ottinger's 8.5h epic set in the Taiga/Mongolia is playing this weekend in LA...just after Kurosawa's Siberian movie. I've discovered an earlier version of Dersu Uzala (1961) by an Armenian (Soviet) director, and the uncanny resonance of Dersu with Apitchapong's forests.

I get the same scam a couple times a year--a "father" wants to hire a Japanese tutor for his "daughter" for some not-bad amount. I guess daddy wants to pay me, then revoke whatever funds he has sent, or get me to refund something more? I dunno. I pester them with so many options they just go away...

Not a bad description of Koreeda world: like "his past work about abandoned children living on their own in Nobody Knows, a ragtag found family in Shoplifters... an inflatable doll that comes to life in Air Doll. Sheep in the Box regards AI creations as just more things for society to fail."

Citations aren't just for staving off misinformation, but also for expanding knowledge bases--the poetics of bringing other people into the convo to stage dialogues & introduce, homage ideas that scaffolded yours & deserve mention as alliance, inspiration. See Sara Ahmed's work on feminist citation.

I'm talking about Siberian movies, including Kurosawa's, at the Academy next Friday the 22nd. Come on down! Herzog has one, Tarkovsky's nephew has one...there are so many movies about chucking it all and moving to Siberia...

"Hand-crafted by a local artisan in the image of the White House." Lol.

Exactly. It's like hearing Hatsune Miku give an interview. At least "she" is upfront about being crowd-funded, and about the fact she is just a ventriloquist for paid inputs.

this looks like an extra tough captcha test

Very interesting piece in the LAT about interpreters for film--Q&As, interviews and such. People might not know that "translation" and "interpreting" can be different skill sets, different people. (Back in the day, in Japanese, when you blended into the BG, interpreting was "whispering" ウィスパーイング) .

I keep thinking about how gorgeous this film is, and how lacerating its treatment of the clash of old and new monies. Like Buñuel meets the country house. Seems to be on streaming these days, but a new restoration is also around. A good YT interview w Sharmila Tagore, Simi Garewal, Wes Anderson.

we heard you hate AI, so at LFP we've been making resources for turning off AI features across the web. but we also don't think AI problems can be solved at an individual level, so we included some of our fav tools for community resistance as well. more to download free at libraryfreedom.org

Project muse has finally started to allow downloads of whole books. Not fragments you have to organize and archive. I feel like I've just found hours of time lying on the sidewalk...

Truly, we are in Radu Jude territory here...

Yipes! the other wise of the web picks up a lot. Even with a VPN...

I'm worried about the impact of the Canvas fail on hiring at my university. I fear the response may be to hire more IT people. I used to be able to pick up the phone (!) and talk to a student employee about why their dumb security system doesn't work, now I have to schedule an appt with an IT guy.

I just taught Momotaro's Sea Eagles, an accomplished anime propaganda film from 1943. In the past, students felt a cognitive dissonance between themselves, the cute bunny warriors with propellor ears, and propaganda. Not so now. They said, literally, nothing would surprise them. They are 21, tops.