My essay in the latest issue of Barthes Studies is out! sites.cardiff.ac.uk/barthes/arti...

This year’s volume features: Hilary Thompson on Roland Barthes and Sumana Roy; Mynt Marsellus on Barthes and Ordinary Language Philosophy; Lennard J. Davis and Trevor Pateman on studying with Barthes in the 1970s; David Johnson on inspiration, photography, notebooks, and the beginning of writing.

This actually helps, thank you

it is 5am in Paris and I am watching via anxiously refreshing the game page/bluesky

so, the Louvre, yeah, 100% worth spending an entire day developing deep blisters to see as much as you can

A treasure trove!

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in a publicity still for the 🇬🇧British gangster movie "THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY" (1980) dir. John Mackenzie

Here are my worst socio-political thoughts. I hope I am not really the person who believes these things. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/10/misa...

There's been a lot of great music this year, but it's pretty likely at this point that my favourite song of the year is this: youtu.be/6dcfVnz9Mg8?...

Is Idris Elba the first actor to play both the Prime Minister of the UK and the President of the United States in the same calendar year (or ever??)

1) Know your values, frame the debate 2) Repetition is key to persuasion 3) Communication, public speaking, and on-camera performance are skills you need to train at to be good at bsky.app/profile/theb...

My favourite part of the NYC mayoral campaign has to be how progressive New Yorkers look at Sliwa and say "Yeah he's an idiot, but he's our idiot! That man is a true New Yorker."

My first peer reviewed publication just dropped at Film Philosophy - talking about genre, Cavell and Scorsese's gangster films doi.org/10.3366/film...

it's funny how when I tell friends that I started rewatching the walking dead on a whim recently everyone just completely understands why

kinda want to mess around and write about the strangest album of the 2000s pop punk moment - Sum 41's Chuck

okay but it should be

gonna need to hold on to this!

I screened this in today’s class on action cinema, and the response it got from my students just blew me away. 😲✊🏻

the purple category in connections today is embarassing

Michael Haneke back with an idea for a new Funny Games remake

reproductive futurism

More Arendt for the moment re Disney/ABC et al: “It was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another”

David Caruso's last episode of NYPD Blue involves Sipoiwicz having to move a dead body all over town... feels like a metaphor

I'm glad Coates is roasting Klein, maybe he can actually knock some sense into him.

Welp

now this I was very much not expecting

watching Much Ado (1993) and need to say again that I need Denzel Washington to play Henry IV on screen before he died - I need his "heavy lies the head" soliloquy like I need oxygen

I'm forcing myself to watch Veep and it's driving me completely up the wall 🙃

the democrats need people in their camp that understand how to manipulate the news cycle like this

I cannot wait to read this!

John Cena did a Canadian Destroyer is not a sentence I ever expected to write

so last night one of three champs retained, tonight it's five of six??? what kind of swerve are they planning tonight for Cena/Rhodes??? A double turn? a reversal from Cena? a Rock appearance?? Honestly this is unquestionably a better night two than WrestleMania's 😂

just fell for my first bit of AI slop news content - there's a YouTube channel posting deep fake Richard Wolff videos, very glad to have friends I check things with

it's actually astounding how Punch-Drunk Love compares with La La Land - I mean I like Chazelle more than most but PTA just blows him out of the water

We're All Unpaid Actors in American Eagle's Marketing Campaign www.readtpa.com/p/the-sydney...

And if you feel like the academy has been preparing for precisely this world, where product is all that matters, you would be correct

saving this for teaching...

To me, this part is most important. I've had students read multiple ai generated “responses” to discussion questions they’d also answered themselves. It takes reading through about 3 before you start to realize it’s all the same. But we mostly use AI independently so don’t see the repetition.

Last week NYT Opinion shifted to suddenly run a bunch of "Gosh, this stuff in Gaza seems really bad, have you seen how bad this is?" content and political elites are absolutely taking cues from their preferred media elites. It was a bat signal: "Time to start salvaging your reputation on this one."

well I guess South Park is now appointment viewing in 2025... is not a statement I ever thought would be true fifteen years ago

"the biggest fiction is that ones days form a story, that you can capture them by telling them." - Cavell, "Ending the Waiting Game" 152

Wake up, babe. New gender neutral bathroom just dropped.

hell? yea, brother

Hulk Hogan ratted out other wrestlers attempting to unionize to save his own position and paycheck above anyone else's & gladly accepted funding from Peter Thiel for his Gawker court case that paved frequently abused legal precedents for the rich to shut down any media outlets that embarrass them.

i hope hulk hogan is wrestling with demons rn