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.

This is largely by design. If we stop thinking about AI as simply technology and instead as part of a political and economic program, its chief function become easier to see: namely to erode interpersonal trust so that ultimately we give up on forms of agreement & negotiation arbitrated by people.

personally I think "Federal Judge Approves Trump Effort to Obtain List of Jews From Penn" is a bad thing to read in the newspaper www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/u...

"A Breakup Letter with Media Studies". I'm happy to share this essay I wrote published in an amazing special issue of Communication, Culture, & Critique. There comes a time when words require a particular degree of honesty because the stakes are immeasurably high. academic.oup.com/ccc/article/...

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.

Media Studies’ Dr. Josh Shepperd is completing the final project of the now-defunct CPB: the official history of US public media. Stay tuned.

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.

‘The most bitter news’: Iran reels as more than 100 children reportedly killed in school bombing www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

We are now accepting submissions for papers, video + audio projects, creative work, works in progress, and group projects. Share the work you’ve developed in MDST with faculty, friends, and the broader community. Deadline: March 30 🔗 rb.gy/ra9dnl #CUBoulder #MediaStudies #UndergraduateResearch

We have a word for this in media history. It's called propaganda.

Listen to Victor. Today's news about further ownership and information consolidation by Paramount is case in point that highlights the dramatic decline of informational diversity and democratic voice in the U.S.

"The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot" HELL. YES.

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).

BREAKING: Protests have erupted at Columbia University after the school says DHS agents detained a student after making "misrepresentations to gain entry" to building.

Despite it all, our collaborative federal/academic research project has been renewed for two more years. Still featuring hundreds of scholars, archivists, curators, and policy analysts. We might be the last game in town for Film and Media Studies, but the need for memory research continues...

RIP - Éliane Radigue is of the great avant-garde composers of world history. If you haven’t listened to her compositions yet, today is a great place to start.

Nope.

People surprised about the depth of the Tucker Carlson interview forget that his dad was Dick Carlson, Director of Voice of America and the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker is a journalism nepo baby who has top training. He’s just a terrible person.

"Many of us who work at universities, not just NYU, have watched in confusion and horror at the way our administrations have approached generative AI and its integration into the systems that we use to teach." AFT has said AI must be a mandatory subject of bargaining.

i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time

literary+cultural studies friends working in grad programs! does your program offer a required introductory seminar for new students? teaching ours again, eager for suggestions of themes, readings +assignments for theory foundations+cohort-cohering. (some past versions in thread below in return)

Today’s Kurt Cobain’s 59th birthday. A few years back I got to write the "official" government dedication for Nirvana and grunge. Probably the one thing that I've done that'll still be read 200 years from now. www.loc.gov/static/progr...

This is an educational catastrophe designed to weaken the humanities at University of Texas.

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide. This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

The website for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is completely scrubbed and gone! They didn't even leave a legacy statement.

It’s going to sound quaint, but the best way to resist an AI takeover of the humanities is to assign physical books, sit around, read them, and argue about ideas. Academic has become such a competitive arena, that we ourselves are trained to look for the winning angle, instead of the best education.

Jesse Jackson, civil rights icon, dies aged 84

Today's weather in Colorado

Hard to believe, at one point a bunch of people were paid yearly salaries to watch and reflect about how they felt about movies. And some of the writing was pretty great.

This is going to be a major book.

This is going to be a major book.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups… “Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”