"This is probably the silliest thing that has ever happened to me" is a line right up there with Albert Brooks and Dan Castellaneta's improvised "Ever see a guy say goodbye to a shoe?" "(chuckles) Just once..." from "You Only Move Twice"

omg

well, that's unfortunately not true lol

The people politically loyal to Graham Platner are, largely, rural people. The people baffled by political loyalty to Graham Platner are, largely, not; and do not understand that the things they consider demerits are a foundation of his political appeal. open.substack.com/pub/rickperl...

PDX folks--I'm giving a talk on MODERNISM on June 11th at SOCIETY (above Mother Foucaults). It's free. Please come! I'd love to see you there (societysocietysociety.com)

The same was absolutely true of Jared Golden. Think long and hard then before posting what you think is a witty form of catharsis whether you’re confirming exactly who poor, rural Mainers who think they’ve been abandoned think you are.

love seeing this op-ed every few days now that basically says "It's Now Permissible To Say That America Is Collapsing In Mainstream Media" that just lists all the things people usually say make America great

Tonight, hours before our election count begins, USC's admin formally ran to the Trump federal NLRB asking them to overturn democracy. This shit is wildly cynical and has huge implications for academic workers nationally and I am begging my journalist followers to get in touch

I'm not sure critiquing white savior narratives is really going to help us understand what the state is doing to Cuba. This is not adequate language to deal with the contradiction that's unfolding--raw, unapologetic 19th century colonial conquest. "White Savior" discourse is how that stuff got

Probably The Last Jedi, but not for generational or “woke” (🙄) reasons. Because it was made for a *fandom* community, making an intervention there. Conversely, I saw Backrooms yesterday and could tell it was one of the first purely Gen Z movies, not “for me,” and was wholly impressed, wowed, etc

"All the agents who had been to Minnesota told me they never wanted to go back, for any reason."

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

In the last 48 hours, The New School has fired almost two dozen colleagues in humanities and social sciences, many of them tenured faculty of color, and multiple staff members, including in social justice.

That’s because Trump himself is the art. He’s singular, an abstraction embodied, a formal expression of a larger totality

The problem is that “I am often scared and angry about social change” does not inherently lend itself to interesting art. You can be as technically skilled as the greats, but art with nothing interesting to say is just a commodity.

ICYMI

This week's @tpnwicmfp.bsky.social is a special one for me, thinking as I am about endings and beginnings in this season of change. We discuss Antonioni's L'ECLISSE, one of the five or so films that I can say have altered the trajectory of my life upon first watch podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l...

I’m thinking of taking back control over music, ditching streaming, and getting a portable media player like the old days. Does anyone have any recs? Don’t need connectivity, but want to play FLAC at 24-bit and to be able to hook up via Bluetooth

The Cinema Pope™️

lmao

Harrowing experience at the dentist today, as Earth, Wind, and Fire was playing on the radio: 50-something dentist: this song always reminds me of Guardians of the Galaxy. Dental hygienist I thought was my age: “What’s that?” then, “Oh, my middle school teacher was into that”

One of the handful of post 9/11 sequences that understood the broader social world that was emerging, instead of turning into war porn

Thinking of developing a new theory of meaning on the social Internet called Sometimes People Just Say Things

folk's.....i did TV studies

I turned my thread on the Slush Fund "bailout" into an article about television aesthetics and the relationship of generations to political coalitions

every time I teach this i'm dumfounded at how prescient it was, and wonder what would have happened had it been published right after the financial crisis instead of the final moments of the End of History Bush years

Everyone is understandably reading Trump's ~$2 billion-dollar slush-fund as evidence of our ongoing transition into a corrupt authoritarian system, which it is, but I wonder if it would be helpful to view it as a bailout for conservative media after its failure to become hegemonic in Trump 2

Sometimes I start feeling really sour in the afternoon, and my psyche begins to revisit the health anxiety I used to have when I was actively drinking and hungover all the time, wondering if I was dying, but then I remember that I had two coffees on an empty stomach and didn’t eat lunch

Makes sense

Just saw Laraaji play Ambient 3 at Ambient Church’s Portland tour date. Spectacular show, catch this if it comes to town

Jacques Attali, Noise (121)

love firing up my new music friday playlists to see how musicians are feeling about the state of the world

It me

this is a very strange time to be starting a new job

Everyone knows Hollywood is fucked, but most people don't actually know why. The studios used the strikes as cover to cancel a full 1/3rd of TV production across the board. 1/3 of TV cast & crew are out of work. Fully. There just aren't jobs for them. Many are people who made your favorite shows.

*ahem*

Ray Dalio wrote a book in 2021 that essentially articulates Arrighi's thesis for the investment class. He went on Ross Douthat's show trying to talk about portfolio management but Douthat is looking for answers only a historical materialist can give www.youtube.com/watch?v=pimF...

"...wha happened?!?!" - going to be hearing a lot more of this sentiment soon I think!

why does he look like David Graeber here lol

Great read on one of the most interesting phenomenons in recent cinephile culture

Yo Portland--I'm teaching a class at @moviemadness.org on Monday, held at PSU in Lincoln Hall at 7PM and I would love to see you there. It will contain some of my recent research on the Cinémàtheque Française, but in the context of how we can do this here in PDX www.moviemadness.org/show/cinephi...

You cannot understand the American right's mental universe without realizing a constitutive trauma over the past ~40 years has been a growing fear of irrelevance and feelings of rejection as liberal culture "won" in mainstream media. It's hard for liberals and leftists to understand this mindset

Shell and the Creation of International Investment Law, 1957–1968 academic.oup.com/ejil/advance...

There are many things to be said here, but bro understands the stakes. I wish different people also understood the stakes and acted accordingly.

why am I currently collecting all of August Blom's filmography at this particular moment in time? why is this out there in the mix today in 2026

The Double Shift made the Marxist reading list (and sale) www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/m...

This is one of the most interesting shows currently airing on American television. The tagline is: “Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do,” and what happens every night is everyone yells at each other for an hour

two interesting temporal "maps" to make sense of the unfolding crisis in Alexander Zevin's latest for NLR: on the one hand, a Baudrillardian layer of the technological mediation of the market, structured by microtransactions and reels, on the other Arrighi's signal crises rearing their head