Chronicling the decline of the industrial age in Hamilton
Shift Change: Scenes from a Post-industrial Revolution Stephen Dale Between the Lines, 2021 How do you write a city? The lives, the languages, the million tangled paths. The strip malls,…
Scott Neigh
Review: We Can Do Better
A short, accessible, measured, and methodical book that lays out what the author describes as a “reconstructed historical materialism” – that is, a way of understanding the world and of…
Review: The Lost History of Liberalism
This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a “conceptual history” – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent…
The novelty and fragility of liberal-democracy
I’ve been reading a scholarly history of liberalism. It isn’t directly about this, but as it reminds me of things that I already knew in broad strokes and fills in…
Review: Age of Anger
A far-ranging and clever book that convinced me of its core thesis but left me with some questions and considerable ambivalence about some of the things surrounding that. The book…
Review: Bored and Brilliant
Some time last year, the realization crystallized for me that I don’t experience much direct loss of explicitly designated work time due to social media or other online activity, but…
Review: Turning to One Another
This is a peculiar book with a powerful idea at its core but presumptions about how the social world works that take it in directions that I think are misguided.…
Thinking about listening and seeing
For more than five years, now, my central project has been a radio show and podcast. And my main book project recently morphed into something that aims to talk about…
The increasing fragility of our ability to know and communicate about the world
I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about the fragility of human communication and of our ability to know the world. That is, I’ve been thinking about how easy…
Review — Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation
This is a fascinating history of the focus group and related technologies of consultation written by journalist Liza Featherstone. Since its inception, the form of listening made possible by the…
What violence do you fail to perceive?
What violence do you fail to perceive? What violence do I fail to perceive? What violence escapes your notice, is invisible, inaudible, imperceptible, floats by like normal or nothing in…
It’s Talking Radical Radio’s Five-Year Anniversary!
Today marks five years since the first episode of Talking Radical Radio appeared. For all of that time, it has been my biggest ongoing project. On a weekly basis, almost…
WIP: Double radio, extra reading, hold the writing
In my first post of the year, back on January 1, I declared an intent to try writing blog posts that were more frequent and casual, often starting from Twitter…
Review: As We Have Always Done
How to read from somewhere – and from where I am in particular – is an ongoing preoccupation in the reviews on this site. It’s always a relevant question, but…
Limits of Listening
A big chunk of the reading and thinking and writing that I’m doing at the moment is focused on working out how to expansively and radically think about listening as…
WIP: A very short post about introductions and about complexity…
One of my tasks for today is finishing writing the introduction for next week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio. And that has me thinking about the challenge of representing complexity…
Perceiving the world as an embodied capacity…and movement-building
Being able to perceive complex elements of the world immediately around us isn’t something we’re just automatically able to do – it’s a capacity, or really many different capacities, that…
Social movement victories in 2018
Today, I want to write about social movement victories. I want to reflect on what that means a little, and then this thread will be one I come back to…
Pushing back against the claim that ending harassment will end romance
I’ve been thinking, over the last few days, about this piece – “Ending Harassment Won’t End Romance” by Sarah Jaffe. It challenges the absurd claim that keeps popping up in…
Eduardo Galeano and the telling of resistant stories
At the moment, I’m in the middle of reading Hunter of Stories by Eduardo Galeano (translated by Mark Fried). Galeano, who died in 2015, was an Uruguayan writer and public…