"Part of his appeal has long come from his music’s ability to combine narrative and political clarity with avant-garde, nonlinear form without sacrificing the wildness of his sounds" www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

end of the american century bsky.app/profile/fina...

"Most urgently, galleries need to push for legally enforceable resale agreements that can block flipping and let them be less fearful of unknown potential clients. And galleries need to stop promoting art as an investment" www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/o...

"Media technologies were used to expand the scope and scale of betting in horse racing in a second consequential way...photography is a cultural technique of what we understand today with the clunky term derivatization" doi.org/10.1215/1743...

wild to me how silent critics have been (in the US at least + as far as i have seen internationally) about park chan-wook's NO OTHER CHOICE from last year--one of the best recent films about dispossession, proletarianization, and labor discipline by automation and ai

huge scoop (though i would imagine they're treading carefully), but what a legal mess! all in the name of "inevitability" ... newsletter.waterandmusic.com/archive/a-sc...

“In [the yuppie-made 1980s], they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/o...

«… if structuralism was correct, then LLMs are already AGI … If structuralism was correct, then LLMs would generate meaning, they would harbor an unconscious, they would participate in the symbolic order. Yet, since LLMs don't do any of those things … structuralism has a lot of explaining to do.»

J. H. Prynne wrote a guide to reading works of literature for Cambridge students. This was the postscript:

Great piece. Legalized gambling is always and everywhere class war.

"Perhaps what the score most resembles is a topographical map, with the arcs like a distant outcropping of mountains and the arrows at the bottom right bringing sketched-­out directions to mind" harpers.org/archive/2026...

TODAY: @annamerlan.bsky.social on an extraordinary 1939 guide to New York City. “Reading the guidebook now gives the sense, not of a past city, but a parallel one, an unseen but strangely familiar river flowing just over the horizon.” flaminghydra.com/new-york-for...

Resignation letters from UVA Rector and Vice Rector to Youngkin. Too long for full alts, but will post excerpts following.

One of the things that genuinely shocked me as I read through surveillance logs for the police is how much of their energy and attention is dedicated to shutting down vigils and other ceremonies of remembrance.

new year, new personal website robarcand.info

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

Warner is saying that any AI deals they'll agree to as a company will be opt-in only. That's consistent with the principles we all agreed to via Human Artistry Campaign. Even if you think gen AI music sucks, that's an important guardrail. www.wmg.com/news/growing...

what would it take to reframe debates about streaming and cultural decline in marxist terms? for @nplusonemag.com i tried to think through the current crisis (AI! VC! A24!) and what a newly militant labor movement could mean for the culture industries www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I skipped this article for a while because I figured I'd read enough about the NYT's Mamdani coverage. I don't want to say the headline does the article a disservice - it is also very much about that - but goes well beyond as well

MAMDANI CAME OUT TO JA RULE "NEW YORK" AND IMMEDIATELY QUOTED EUGENE DEBS

really great www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/sta...

Fred Turner on "The Texan Ideology"

"The digital image is dead, long live whatever fluid vessel has taken its place this week." @robarcand.bsky.social reviews Hito Steyerl’s new collection, "Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-network-of-global-incinerators/

My friend @rorshock.bsky.social — CS undergrad, humanities PhD — has built a brilliant prgm @ The New School: “Code as a Liberal Art” nurtures “code + computational thinking as tools for critical + creative inquiry,” and as forces for 👍+👎 social change. His spring Software Engineering class looks 🌟

Tomorrow I start as an Asst Prof in Communication, Media and Arts at Seton Hall. Last spring, news that this opportunity would pan out coincided very closely with the passing of my advisor, Jonathan Sterne. Some overdue reflections on that, mostly on Jonathan, here: akstuhl.net/blog/2025-08...

i did literally nothing to bring this together except lend them an essay that i already wrote, but i'm totally geeking out about this zine. just go look at the collection of art in the first couple of pages, i'm so enthralled right now, i love it. i desperately want to buy a physical copy.

‘Weren’t all Black people owed something for the dispossession that accumulated over generations? Or was the university’s primary function only to pursue knowledge about the history that gave rise to these questions?’ Vincent Brown reviews ‘Yale and Slavery’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“No Other Land” Co-Director Hamdan Ballal Freed, Says Yuval Abraham Via Deadline

‘No populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces. Programmatically, the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism are still for the most part whistling in the dark.’ New: Perry Anderson on neoliberalism after the crash. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

like this is how to study technology

Here's a more fulsome post from the Press. So sad. Farewell to Jonathan Sterne dukeupress.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/f...

🗣️ Great news! The panel I co-organized with @robarcand.bsky.social, Marie Lecuyer, Owen Stewart-Robinson, and @hnnht.bsky.social has been accepted to 4S 2025 in Seattle 🥳 🗣️ Catch us this September, speaking on "Oceans of Data: Knowledge Production in Aquatic Environments" 🐬

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Jonathan for the past 15 years or so, and I’ve admired + aimed to emulate his creativity, kindness, and generosity for my entire career. i was honored to be asked to extol his virtues in recommendation letters over the past several years. Jonathan deserves all the 🏆

Earlier today, a group of students received word that Jonathan Sterne entered hospice care yesterday following his ongoing battle with cancer. I think there's a few of his colleagues and former students that follow me on here (he's also currently my phd advisor), more info will be coming soon

what began as essentially a hostile takeover in its most debased form is now deploying state power to ostensibly force advertisers to continue to pay, true sign of the times www.wsj.com/business/med...

never a better time to reconnect with posting