Just realized that @versobooks.bsky.social includes a link to an epub version of the book with each paperback order (no DRM!). Amazing, thank you! This brings us one step closer to a Bandcamp for books. Are any other publishers doing that?

Next week in Search & Discovery we discuss music discovery. Liz Pelly joins us for a trip to WFMU, and we document our own musical discovery memoirs — how we cultivated our tastes across phases of our lives :) crossreference.wordsinspace.net/spring2026/w...

This is tomorrow, and I am super-psyched 🤗

Tomorrow (Wed Apr 1, no fooling) it's the CLUBLANDS edition of the Popular Music Books online series, w/ Maren Hancock & Charity Marsh on Canadian DJ culture and Al Shipley on Baltimore club music. Get out on the floor w/ us at 5:30 pm! Here's how: iaspm-us.wildapricot.org/Popular-Musi...

Tomorrow, Thu, Somerville MA!

WFMU's 2026 Fundraising Marathon ends tomorrow! Support listener-sponsored, freeform radio! Pledge here and help us reach our goal: pledge.wfmu.org/donate?step=...

what a charming bunch of jim-jims.

BTW, also at the same gallery is a show of paintings by Jean Dubuffet and John Fahey, paired up for some reason.

A judge threw out Columbia's expulsion orders last week, and this week, a court has ruled that students can sue the shitty little organisation that defamed them. hellgatenyc.com/group-that-c...

WFMU's 2026 Fundraising Marathon, which ends Sunday, is now in its semi-final stretch! Pledge now, win prizes, and support amazing listener-sponsored radio! See our beautiful new swag (wfmu.org/swag) and all the DJ premiums we're offering (wfmu.org/dj-premiums). Pledge here: pledge.wfmu.org/donate

Gaylord Fields drops by Music To Spazz By for week two of WFMU’s Fundraising Marathon. Expect prizes and shenanigans with a double dose of stupid. In other words, appointment radio. Tonight at 9 ET on 91.1 FM WFMU (photo by Jean Schwarzwalder) @wfmu.bsky.social pledge.wfmu.org/donate/MS

See here for expert analysis: www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-wild-day...

Tonight's special fundraising edition of my show, "It's Complicated," with guest co-host Matt Fiveash, hits the airwaves at 7 p.m. Listen at wfmu.org, and make a pledge to support listener-funded @wfmu.bsky.social and my show here: pledge.wfmu.org/donate/GX

Tonight (7 p.m. ET), tune in as Matt Fiveash joins me for my second of two shows in WFMU's 2026 Fundraising Marathon. If you appreciate the amazing radio that everyone at freeform, listener-supported @wfmu.bsky.social does, support us and pledge whatever you can here: pledge.wfmu.org/donate/GX

@wfmu.bsky.social Fundraising Marathon, Day 4 (photo tranche 2/3) Pledge now: pledge.wfmu.org Listen: wfmu.org #wfmu #wfmu2026marathon #radio #freeform #freeformradio #photography #q3mono #monochrom #leicamonochrom #leicaq3monochrom #fabio #claypigeon

I helped organize this memorial zine to my beloved doctoral advisor @jonathansterne.bsky.social. Thanks to all the contributors for their beautiful offerings. Sound ON for silly, apropos page turning sound effects. intercomzine.com

on the air raising righteous greenbacks for @wfmu.bsky.social with the legend @creamocoyl.bsky.social from now 'til 6pm! tune in, pledge, win swag, then drop back out! wfmu.org

Back in 2014 I made a radio app using the Echo Nest's API that indexes all of the Free Music Archive. I just found out that on 2020 @erazlogo.bsky.social wrote about this in an article published in Radio Journal (sick). However, EN sold to Spotify and killed the API (shocking). The goal here was..

Realized today that I'm working on the last and final project of the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Which is the official history of US public media, with Allison Perlman (Irvine), and Mike Janssen (Current).

Some context to the current situation in Iran. On 19 August 1953 Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup led by MI6 and the CIA under the name Operation Boot/Ajax. The aim was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalised the country’s oil industry.

U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic, reportedly for "intelligence assessments, including target identification and simulation of combat scenarios" even after the supposed ban

Seriously exciting news. This, from eight years ago, gets at the scope of the book. Honored to have talked with him for it. www.wired.com/story/invisi...

snow day news drop: last week, i turned in a draft of the book i've been working on for the past 6 years! right now, it's called "the invisible hit parade: a taper's history of music" & will be out in 2027 from da capo/hachette. much more to come, obviously!

Listening to a fascinating conversation about R&B history with Amani Roberts, @brandontensley.bsky.social & Emily Lordi & just realized that Whitney Houston grew up in East Orange, NJ, also home to Queen Latifah & WFMU. Part of Popular Music Books in Process Series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=htEX...

aw, peace to a legendary taper/engineer, the link between bob dylan & ESP-disk'.

For you @bourgwick.bsky.social

Sorry to hear reports of the passing of audio engineer Richard Alderson. I interviewed him early in the newsletter's run about recording the Second Gaslight Tape and all the famous 1966 shows. You wouldn't know "Judas" without Alderson.

Be still my beating heart

The brilliant Jessica Swanston Baker is required pregame reading today - on music, language, transmission, power, and the caribbean www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...

Watch Vanessa Díaz, co-author of "P FKN R," talk about Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl halftime show on CNN: www.cnn.com/2026/02/06/w...

“Iyou could shove it in your purse or your pocket...There were, say, a few hundred book stores in the US but there were thousands of little drugstores+ bus stations+so on in small towns.That’s why they’re called mass market. There was a much more robust system for getting these books out there.”

Good news for Californians who like affordability and fairness in live music. Another sign of growing momentum.

"Musicians of every stripe are struggling. Re-erecting old hierarchies won’t solve that, but maybe pluralistic, noncommercial ways of valuing music and new solidarities between musicians will." Can we have a noncommercial solidarities turn in music studies too please? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/o...

Big congrats to @akstuhl.bsky.social for winning the 2026 SCMS dissertation award. For “Unmaking a Medium: Automation and Art in American Radio, 1950–2010,” supervised by Jonathan Sterne (McGill).

Why is @newyorker.com denying me a pithy @susanorlean.bsky.social's original subheadline offering AI slop instead? Also, the article was published on September 27, 1999 not September 20. AI-slopped date perhaps?

“Under the Ivanishvili regime, power is quiet, opaque, and cowardly. It doesn’t need tanks – its atmosphere and aspirations are enough oppression. If the system is choking culture, then culture has to push back with its full body." Underground Music in Tbilisi, by Nick Hudson buff.ly/JSfiqBR

404 Media has published the full user guide for ELITE, the tool Palantir made for ICE to bring up addresses for deportation targets. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Scoop here by @josephcox.bsky.social: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...

Kid Rock testifies against Live Nation and Ticketmaster's "cartel" at Senate hearing

Tell your reps to co-sponsor the LWMA: actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...

oh man, the Walker Art Center is going to be closed on Friday (If you're not from the Twin Cities, this is like MoMA closing in support of a general strike—a very big deal)

if u want to subscribe to an independent, worker-owned music and culture pub w/great criticism (and features, interviews, blogs etc) from five ppl you know and love, hearing things launched in october 2024 in the wake of conde nast's pitchfork layoffs :) www.hearingthings.co

Now listening: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, University of Oslo, December 10, 1964 on WFMU www.wfmu.org/playlists/sh...

New from @dukepress.bsky.social : P FKN R How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance By Vanessa Díaz & Petra R. Rivera-Rideau “…offers a critical reflection of Puerto Rico’s history and culture through one of its main exponents, Bad Bunny…” - Jorell Meléndez-Badillo #Caribe

Bandcamp has banned Gen AI music and audio from its platform. But Bandcamp hasn’t had as serious a problem with AI as mainstream DSPs, because of the way the service is structured. There’s no incentive to upload a glut of derivative tracks, hoping for a playlist driven windfall.

Bandcamp just banned AI-generated music. blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/k...

Statement by the union of Iranian bus-drivers. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/12/s...

Wave Farm, the great transmission arts org, is seeking an IT consultant “to maintain and troubleshoot organization IT infrastructure including network management, hardware, and systems administration” — both remote and on-site in the Catskill area