Indeed. And please read @katejewell.bsky.social :)

Like @mychal3ts.bsky.social writes, “The library is always here for you." That's why we're committed to being here for our libraries. This year, we're adding $31.7 million in permanent, baseline funding to our city's three library systems so they can better serve New Yorkers.

We’re seeing the reemergence of academia as a sport of the leisure class.

Congrats to Penn State faculty on unionizing.

The Dismantling of Black Studies: “Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.” www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Today’s forest view

universities have the brainpower, resources,+ community obligation to develop on-site secure NON PROFIT learning management systems + ed tech overseen by actual educators, not data-extraction censorious surveillance profiteers! VOID THE CONTRACTS theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/mamdani-wi...

the most anti free speech administration in this country’s history

New concept for a class: “Stuart Hall’s Reading List”: all of the philosophy and theory that he read and synthesized in building a new tradition.

A reader reached out yesterday and I've heard anecdotes like this before but I think it's really valuable to remind ourselves that access to the internet is iffy in places right here in the U.S. It's one reason @joshshepperd.bsky.social has said local public radio stations are so important rn!

Our Library of Congress RPTF caucus, the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, featured by The Guardian today!

May Day activities in Chicago.

The big takeaway of the AI discourse is that we have to stop trying to replace each other.

Delighted to return to University of Chicago for two theory talks. I'll discuss primary document findings that detail how Theodor Adorno's engagement with early communications researchers helped inspire the "Culture Industry" chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. voices.uchicago.edu/massculture/...

Delighted to announce that KVCU University of Colorado Radio just won its 60th (sixtieth) national award since January, 2025. Happy to serve as faculty advisor and so impressed with our students and GM Iris Berkeley!

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is best known for its tracking of hate groups, said that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the nonprofit regarding their use of informants.

We’re going back to Paris for a month again this summer. I’m going to write a book at the libraries in the Latin Quarter and eat some fucking crepes.

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired?

Entering year ten of my appointment as the first and only Sound Fellow of the Library of Congress. I have no idea how I got here. The advocacy and infrastructure work associated with the role has been good, nearly impossible, and worthwhile.

RIP Asha Bhosle - one of the great Bollywood singers of all time. Check out this funk track from 1971 with pumping bass.

Going to teach a class in the near future where all we do is listen to Fugazi.

Congrats to my old friend Aadam Jacobs, deservingly receiving international recognition from numerous press sites for creating probably the most important live music archive of the past 30 years, simply by being Aadam.

Moving and here’s roughly our new view. Colorado just looks like this everywhere.

josh’s comments here get at the truth of the trump cuts: democrats can’t just turn funding streams back on when in power. the infrastructure has been badly damaged—we’ll need a wholesale reimagining and reinvestment in the reconstruction of public media (as well as all our other public institutions)

Interviewed again about the future of public media by Columbia Journalism Review. They made my quote the title of the piece.

Learned yesterday that AI monitors Bluesky "Starter Packs" to determine who to cite for academic expertise. So I'm starting one for Media History. I'm too busy to search for every name. If you're a media historian nominate yourself in the comments and I'll add you.

Picked up almost 1000 followers this weekend, simply because I posted that we should read books together and talk about them. Something is happening out there.

Resonance (UC Press) is looking for humanities research across the following topics: Sound in Political Crisis, Sound and Social Justice, Experiments in Sound, Sound Archives and Preservation, and we're convening a permanent series that'll examine "Film and Cinema Sound" this Fall. Please circulate!

you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

I was interviewed by Ohio Public Media about how noncommercial stations are coping with the loss of federal funds. It's led to new pressures being exerted by state legislatures for NPR and PBS affiliates to self-censor what some conservatives consider to be controversial programming.

Nancy Fraser: “On the colonisation of the lifeworld, I felt that, in essentialising the system/lifeworld distinction, Habermas masked historically specific forms of male domination and missed the transformative potential of feminist movements.”

Carol Kaye is probably the most underrated bass player in history. And probably your favorite bass player that you didn’t realize was your favorite bass player. Do a quick search of every hit that she played on.

Want something to listen to? I'm really loving the queer, witchy music of Chavela Vargas (1919-2012). Vargas reinterpreted ranchera and folklore songs with a distinctively gravely voice. She dressed in men's clothes and came out publicly at the age of 81!

epistemicide

Apparently my talk on AI and the author function was recorded and is available from Linda Hall Library: www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3te...

Delighted to give an invited talk about the history of public media policy in the symposium "Canceling the State: Legal and Political Backlash Against Public Institutions," at Wayne State this Friday.

I worked on this on the Library of Congress project for about five years, and CBS was not interested in preserving their history!

Looking forward to co-presenting an invited talk with @sadiecouture.bsky.social at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. We'll discuss how we built and sustained our Library of Congress academic/federal collaborative research project, now in its 12th year.

RIP Jurgen Habermas - one of the five major social theorists of the past 60 years. Much to learn from his work. Many gaps, some errors, but he was so rigorous that he inspired some of the best simultaneously dissenting and generative thought of any postwar academic.

15% cuts across faculty and staff at The New School 😢

I was interviewed for this Boston Globe piece on the changing infrastructural landscape of NPR and PBS after the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

March 8, 2026 - Tehran at sunrise today. But the sun is hidden behind a sky filled with smoke. After a night of intensive strikes on oil facilities, thick black clouds now hang over the city, turning morning into something that feels like night.

Few pre-book copies of "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" arrived in package, and some kind endorsements from scholars whom I deeply respect. The book is going to be published in late March through MIT Press.

Narrator: "They did not stop him from making a mess of our Constitution."

I found 16mm films about Turkey in the middle of the United States and I wanted to understand why they were made. After years of research, I uncovered why they were sponsored, how they circulated, how they were received, and what they communicated. For answers: Film Diplomacy. ✨

Predicting a return to reading books. It will be on the frontier of resisting subjection.

Unbelievable Tracy Chapman show just preserved by the Aadam Jacobs Collection project.

Check out Jason Loviglio's new book "Empathy Machines," which looks at the history of NPR, sound, voice, and public media's complex relationship with national ideology.