boomers: dig me! gen x: free me! millennials: see me! gen z: diagnose me!

If anyone feels like buying me a belated xmas present. www.abebooks.com/Collected-St...

What's your favorite show-within-a-show? www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZLk...

Going in to 2026 thusly . . .

Speaking of music, how many of you can remember buying some kind of book or magazine that came with a flexi disk? And if so, what was it?

As this year comes to an end, we're looking back at some of our 2025 highlights. Featured in Best Books round-ups in The Spectator and Financial Times, and reviewed in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and New Scientist, these books are not to be missed! See more: www.politybooks.com/blog-detail/...

One of my resolutions for 2026: Listen to more albums from start to finish, and try to chill on the whole random shuffle button thing.

Happy Mamdani Day for those who celebrate. Looking out my window and I can already see Wall Street Types losing their top hats, chased down the street by gangs of singing orphaned immigrant children, shepherded gently into adequately heated re-education centers run by implacable polyfaith queers.

I asked ChatGPT what it has learned about humans from all these billions of interactions. The answer was pretty wild. open.substack.com/pub/dominicp...

Favourite books of 2025. @dominicpettman.bsky.social and Eugene Thacker's "Sad Planets" was a revelation, "More and More and More" should be compulsory reading to understand our energy systems, @dayofthemutants.bsky.social's "More Bugs" really lingered with me, and I love every Sofia Samatar book.

Plato: “You must escape the goon cave.” Baudrillard: “There is no outside the goon cave.”

The most intense "will they, won't they" energy on TV since MOONLIGHTING.

Congrats to Aaron Jaffe & Michael Miller! New Flusser translations are always something to celebrate.

Factoid of the day: Angus Young is the only person on Earth to have been at every single AC/DC concert.

All grades are in.

Annual tradition . . . the transporting folk mix by @michaeltanner.bsky.social www.mixcloud.com/folkradiouk/...

It's not too late to wrap this under the slowly dying tree in your so-called "living" room.

An increasingly popular self-description on LinkedIn etc. is "decision-maker." What's next? . . . "Transport-taker"? "Food-ingester"? "Terrain-coverer"?

A banger from Friedrich for the holiday season.

Scientists sound alarm, claiming evidence of dangerously low levels of moxie in the general population.

Choosing to be an academic is like choosing to live inside only “The Council of Elrond” chapter in Lord of the Rings. Forever.

Been there . . .

A rather phantasmagoric photo of me and Baudrillard himself . . . a couple of years before he performed his final fatal strategy.

Zoom sweats

"His Dank Materials: Inside Bernie's Meme Factory"

feelings of structures

How your email finds me . . .

For sale: master’s tools, never used.

My Gen Z students were making fun of "millennial humor" in class today, but weren't very clear on the difference, when pressed. All they could say was that it was "cringe," and "it feels like they still care about something."

NYT Headline: "Some china shop employees express reservations about giving giant bull full access to store."

A page from SAD PLANETS

From Robber Barons to Robber Bros.

The Frankfurt School be like . . .

1925: the roaring twenties 2025: the boring twenties

Another Saturday morning, another hour spent rearranging my spreadsheet of student rankings between the top 1%, 5% or 10%.

Most people know that William Gibson wrote his prophetic future-noir classic NEUROMANCER on an old-fashioned typewriter. Less people are aware that Emily Brontë wrote WUTHERING HEIGHTS on a steam-powered Jacquard Loom.

I gave my wife a hyperobject for her birthday, but it was of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that she couldn't enjoy it.

Last night I dreamed I was in a band, still playing 2000-seaters after a couple of decades on the road. I can't remember the name of the band but I do recall the names of the three songs that got some radio-play: "Acrylic Patty," "Lightbulb Audit," and "This is a Formal Complaint (Official Version)"