I can’t believe it’s mid-August. I’m terribly behind on my reading list. Still, I did want to draw attention to this entertaining and extremely shareable article on the glory of Record Head, a legendary record store in Milwaukee. Make sure to watch their public access TV commercials at the link.
Books & Reading
Finished reading: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida 📚
Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye have taken on a critical calling: preserving the legacy of The Cramps for posterity.
Finished reading: Yesteryear A Novel by Caro Claire Burke 📚
If you’re looking to be depressed, see this early research from Business Insider on the social implications of GLP-1 usage and how it may impact relationships in the home and workplace.
Dan Hon made me laugh with “carbon-based chauvinism.”
I found this piece from an anthology celebrating 50 years of women’s studies, which explores the intersection of scholarship and publishing practices over time.
Among other disappointing SCOTUS announcements today: Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer. In a previous life, I worked in the same college as a cancer researcher who developed twenty years of conclusive research that Roundup causes cancer in dogs by studying Scottish terriers. Scotties, it turns out, tend to be susceptible to bladder cancer, and thus make good candidates for related research when cancer is present. For several years, I got to witness a veritable army of Scottie dogs dressed in bowties and plaid jovially trotting in and out of our veterinary research hospital to seed her research during their cancer treatments in West Lafayette.
What I learned during that time is that a great deal of veterinary research is about looking for health patterns across species. While not all carcinogens act identically across species, most known cancer-causing agents affect both dogs and people in similar ways. Because dogs share our homes and have similar biological responses to toxins, scientists track canine cancers as an early-warning system for human health risks and to research viable interventions to treat them.
In any case, while I don’t know the ins and outs of the specific laws in play here, this is a disappointing outcome when it comes to the science.
Finished reading: The Mixed Marriage Project A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts 📚
Finished reading: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy 📚
Finished reading: A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle 📚
Finished reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚
“How internet misogyny parallels ‘real-world’ harassment” is a 2007 paper in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism by my old co-blogger, Jill, on her experience being harassed online by peers she knew IRL. Many parallels to current attitudes, all enabled and accelerated by digital networks and tools.
It’s a pleasure to read such a deft writer. Currently reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚
I followed the discourse on this one, but the book itself was much more sad than I expected. I did appreciate her thoughts on the pressure of balancing a public persona with the reality of being a messy and unfinished person, as we all are. Finished reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚
This one was okay. It felt like a series of earnest blog posts without a real throughline. Finished reading: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell 📚
There are enough common signs of AI writing now that the subject has its own Wikipedia page. Via John Gallagher’s latest on “template rhetoric.”
Finished reading: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 📚
Read this alongside The Bluest Eye. Finished reading: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell 📚
A quarter of the way in and already exhausted/confounded. Currently reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚
I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, crass and vulgar, but in the big leagues all the same. Reading the Auf der Maur bio reminded me that a lot of the punk scene was steeped in ideas about social roles and archetypes and oriented around upending them – or at least giving them a healthy challenge. This subculture was also populated by poets and artists in the classical sense. The retro polish around ’90s pop culture has flattened that texture, but it was genuinely a thing.
The era also introduced the woman rock star, introducing women who wrote and performed with full creative authority, not just as muses, groupies or singers. The reception from fans and critics was mixed, and the discourse around Courtney Love in particular was gross and volatile. Most of the positions she was vilified for read as entirely unremarkable today. I was a teenager during all of this, too young to meaningfully participate, but the aesthetic dominated my early adolescence. At the time I loved Tori Amos and PJ Harvey like kids now love Chappell Roan. What I forgot over time is how literary the era was, and how romantic, both in the literary sense and in relation to the New Romantics of the 1980’s. Big culture lessons for a starry-eyed teenager.
L7’s music is not that deep – it’s metal for meatheads, by design – but their politics and presence were. While poking around, I found that L7 was one of four bands featured in the 1995 documentary film Not Bad For a Girl, which was co-produced by Love and Kurt Cobain. The film focused on several all-female indie punk bands and won Best Documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996. I’ve never heard of it before now. It got middling reviews from critics then, and it’s not available streaming in full in English, unless you’re viewing it here at this dubious Google Drive link – which I will do and report back.
It looks like Wordpress has produced a short-form blogging app that duplicates the model we are trying over here on the even-more-indie web. I might give it a spin.
I’m reading about trends in book and phone bans in American public schools, and reminded that reading novels was once considered an idle and immoral pasttime, just as internet use is today. This 2016 article from JSTOR goes into the history of reading books and the fear that it “enfeebled the mind.”
If folks want quality first-person writing about age and aging, I highly recommend the newsletter magazine Oldster, which explores “the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.” Bonus: Oldster is run by Sari Botton, formerly the longtime essay editor of Longreads.
Finished reading: Even the Good Girls Will Cry A ’90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur 📚
I missed this 2025 article by Noah Hawley on Vonnegut, war and the atomic bomb, and it is worth the time.
A nostalgic read on how music nerdery bloomed online.
Finished reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor 📚
I once worked in a role where I keyed million dollar manufacturing orders into SAP, information that directly fed into factory specs for a manufacturing facility based in another country. Our regional office fed into a massive, global electrical engineering firm that ran on small margins (electricity delivery is a well-trod market), so our ability to deliver accurate orders on time was a differentiator in a field that is otherwise easily interrupted by chip shortages and logistics chains.
It was a big job. I learned a ton about electrical engineering, manufacturing and global logistics from a particular vantage point in North America. Our headquarters were based in Sweden, with locations around the world to support the electrical grid(s), covering both hardware and software solutions. My colleagues and I worked in positions that sat somewhere between B2B customer service, inside sales and data entry, and were expected to maintain a 99.8% accuracy rate because a single fat finger error would cascade across myriad systems, impacting real-world operations to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per error.
Once (and only once), I fat-fingered a serial number during data entry which ruined an entire shipment of widgets. In response, the factory in Mexico sent the incorrect order of widgets, about five pallets, to my location in the United States so I could correct the order by hand. One by one, I had to physically remove each widget from a pallet, then from its individual shipping container, make a correction on the widget itself, and repackage each one, signing my name on each unit to ensure it was corrected by an accountable employee. I can’t recall why the issue couldn’t have been corrected on the factory floor, but it wasn’t on the menu. It was going to stay my problem.
This was the one and only factory error I made in about five years of tenure, precisely because it was so painful to correct it. The process was a little embarrassing but nobody made it especially so. Instead my coworkers up and down the org chart relayed a simple expectation: the desk workers need to pay attention to the details because the alternative is too costly. A few old-timers made sure to razz me about it in good humor, but ultimately the error was mine and the fix was mine, and the experience stuck because the whole chain of responsibility understood the stakes and reinforced the consequences. They also trusted me to stick around and continue to do my best.
During my annual review that year, I was dinged for only having a 98% accuracy rate, and I knew why that was a fair assessment.
I thought about this when I read today’s NYT piece on whether 90% accuracy is good enough for LLMs.
Related-ish: The important legacy of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.
Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.
I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.