like the moon
I’ve got a piece in this week’s Boston Phoenix discussing the spectacular shuttering of Megaupload and the collateral damage produced by an increasingly aggressive copyright regime in tandem with a remarkable nonchalance about preserving the digital libraries we build. Some will recognize this as but the latest instance of platform politricks, just another rug yanked […]
Read More →The first time one of my daughters said “internet,” I was deeply curious about what she might understand it to be. So I asked. Here’s how it went down: “Did you get it on the internet?” “What do you mean?” Slight pause. “I’m just saying ‘internet.’ … Internet.” It was an awesome bit of backpedaling, […]
Read More →orthogonal image copied from some website or other I’ve been working on this monstruo post since last January, and hinting at it here and there, making it feel all the more urgent to finish though I haven’t had the time to tie it up. And yet, what has made finally publishing this post so hard […]
Read More →Louis Chude-Sokei has just published one of the more textured and sympathetic accounts of Nigerian 419 scammers I’ve read to date. Touching on everything from e-waste to Nollywood, proposing a tongue-in-cheek anti-eco-tourism, and taking into its analysis the way that transnational hustler culture speaks through the (dated) language of hip-hop and dancehall, it’s an incisive […]
Read More →The students in Elizabeth Stark‘s class at Yale this semester, “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age,” have put together a wonderful 24-minute documentary on “borrowing culture in the remix age,” including some really smart, confident, eloquent, and creative people (though I’d have liked to see some browner faces in the mix). Anyway, do check it […]
Read More →Ah, music (departments). Here’s an excerpt from an email I received this week from the academic administrator in my dept here at MIT (which, in case you didn’t know, is Foreign Languages & Literatures, not, as some might assume, Music & Theater Arts): In order to justify [cross-listing your course] to the Music Faculty, they […]
Read More →Yesterday morning I wrote what I feared might be the last rent check I could write for the foreseeable future; by yesterday evening those fears had vanished, as I learned that MIT would be offering me a Mellon Fellowship for the next two years. Wayne saved! And not a moment too soon. 11th hour, really. […]
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