Books & Reading on F L O T I S S E R I E

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:33:15 -0500

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.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:50:45 -0500

Finished reading: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida 📚

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:14:10 -0500

Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye have taken on a critical calling: preserving the legacy of The Cramps for posterity.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:09:04 -0500

Finished reading: Yesteryear A Novel by Caro Claire Burke 📚

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:23:11 -0500

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.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:17:39 -0500

Dan Hon made me laugh with “carbon-based chauvinism.”

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:27:25 -0500

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.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:42:22 -0500

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.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:24:08 -0500

Finished reading: The Mixed Marriage Project A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts 📚

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:26:15 -0500

Finished reading: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy 📚

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:04:04 -0500

Finished reading: A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle 📚

Fri, 29 May 2026 22:04:22 -0500

Finished reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚

Fri, 29 May 2026 11:30:23 -0500

“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.

Thu, 28 May 2026 07:14:54 -0500

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 📚

Wed, 27 May 2026 20:57:03 -0500

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 📚

Wed, 27 May 2026 20:49:00 -0500

This one was okay. It felt like a series of earnest blog posts without a real throughline. Finished reading: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell 📚

Tue, 26 May 2026 08:27:24 -0500

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.”

Mon, 11 May 2026 11:58:51 -0500

Finished reading: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 📚

Mon, 11 May 2026 09:57:32 -0500

Read this alongside The Bluest Eye. Finished reading: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell 📚

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:07:22 -0500

A quarter of the way in and already exhausted/confounded. Currently reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:05:00 -0500

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.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:38:06 -0500

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.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:05:30 -0500

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.”

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:13:23 -0500

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.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:04:50 -0500

Finished reading: Even the Good Girls Will Cry A ’90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur 📚

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:05:00 -0500

I missed this 2025 article by Noah Hawley on Vonnegut, war and the atomic bomb, and it is worth the time.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:17:46 -0500

A nostalgic read on how music nerdery bloomed online.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:03:38 -0500

Finished reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor 📚

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:37:24 -0500

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.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:20:16 -0500

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.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:55:11 -0500

An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.

Some thoughts:

When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:24:36 -0500

Finished reading: Bog Queen by Anna North 📚

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:00:36 -0500

I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces.

Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. Incidentally, they come from the same cohort we loosely refer to as “feminist blogging,” though both would probably bristle at the description. And both use autoethnographic methods to leverage their personal lives to tell bigger stories about social, cultural and economic dynamics (a common method among feminists, where the personal is often made explicitly political). Lemieux goes further by including a series of essays by other Black single mothers at the end of her book, expanding the frame from memoir into something more collective, a full bloom.

West’s book has gone ultra viral over the last few weeks while Lemieux’s has found significantly less footing. West’s work is being spectacularized in real time, while Lemieux’s support has been mostly grassroots, respectful (thankfully), and largely limited to Black media outlets and NPR. This reproduces one of the oldest patterns in feminist media: a white woman’s confessional work circulates as universal or spectacular (West is being treated like a spectacle currently, which is great for sales and visibility but comes with negative trade-offs), while a Black woman doing rigorous, arguably more structurally ambitious work gets categorized as niche, an outlier. That this is happening within the very audience that would generally name and critique this dynamic in any other context makes it worth sitting with.

While I respect both authors and their bodies of work, I am looking forward to Lemieux’s book because I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a publisher and an audience for serious, foundational work like this. I suspect it will prove relevant long after the viral moment is over.

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:09:37 -0500

Finished reading: Life in Code by Ellen Ullman 📚

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Do you have what it takes to be the next McDonald’s CEO? A quiz about this week’s funniest business story.

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:04:52 -0500

Following the news on Meta glasses this week and how real people are moderating that content loop, watching and moderating all of our intimate video footage, including our most private moments. Last year, my book club read a speculative fiction novel about this very dynamic called “Moderation” by Elaine Castillo. Recommended.

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:30:46 -0500

Looking at this new book by Michael Berube (mensch and legend) on what science fiction can tell us about our contemporary crises. Berube and I used to play Words With Friends together and I assure you he’s a killer.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:43:00 -0500

McKenzie Wark for Verso Books on Donna Haraway, in 2015: “Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, or appeal to something outside of it. But this would be to remain stuck in the stage of romantic refusal. Just as Marx fused the romantic fiction that another world was possible with a resolve to understand from the inside the powers of capital itself, so too Haraway begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international. One not just of laboring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making.”

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:06:41 -0500

Where are the women? A brief history of women in the computer sciences.

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:33:06 -0500

“A brief history on writing, a forgotten technology: how the challenges we face in today’s digital age can be traced back to one of the most significant yet underrated innovations of all time.”

Closer to the machine

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:36:40 -0500

There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was.

I’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the Machine” - and her observations about proximity to technology feel relevant here. Being close to the machine means understanding its actual capabilities and limitations apart from the prevailing sales narratives. It also means a kind of loneliness, because you are working in a space that others don’t yet see clearly or fully understand.

I suspect people thinking seriously about AI right now will experience something similar: a stretch of hostility and discomfort while the rest of the world catches up and the consumer market level-sets on the promises being made. In the interim, the hype will not match the reality, and the reality will sometimes exceed the hype in ways no one predicted. And for a while, how it works and why it matters won’t be legible to everyone at once.

Crunching for clarity

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 11:12:00 -0500

In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

This was my era in college, and I remember feeling challenged and overwhelmed as an undergrad trying to read theory for the first time. So today, I asked Claude.ai to put it in plain language, just to see what would happen. Here’s the after:

Scholars used to think that capitalism shaped society in consistent, predictable patterns. But newer thinking focuses on how power works—how it repeats, overlaps, and gets reshaped over time. This brought time into the picture and moved away from older theories that treated social structures as fixed. Instead, recognizing that structures can change opened up a new way of understanding power: it's tied to specific moments and strategies, and it's always being renegotiated.

Rules without lessons

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:23:47 -0500

If you spend time around cycling and pedestrian advocates, the debate between bans and regulations is familiar territory. When I got deep into road biking, where I learned to ride long distance through a red state with almost no bike infrastructure outside tight urban and exurban areas, one of the best things I did was take road classes through the League of American Bicyclists. You learn the rules of the road from a cyclist’s perspective and practice skills like riding with car traffic under expert guidance, including how to change a flat on the side of the road in the height of summer, gritty with sweat and road grime.

The challenge is that bike education isn’t standardized, so most cyclists never learn the fundamentals anyway. Many of us learned as kids and haven’t had a refresh since. I get stomach pain when I see people riding at night without a light, going too fast on a dedicated path, and adults riding their bike on a pedestrian sidewalk. But when I think about e-bike bans and pedestrian right-of-way debates, it strikes me that outside of getting a driver’s permit for car drivers, there’s essentially no infrastructure for learning how to share roads and paths safely. We’re trying to regulate behavior most of us didn’t learn in earnest.

Affinity as an organizing principle

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:55:46 -0500

Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions:

“In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.”

As always, this drives me back to Haraway’s cyborg, a useful metaphor for thinking about our political, environmental and social tangle and how it butts up against emerging tech and science. (In Haraway’s context, it was the rise of STEM as a driving force in academia at the dawn of the computer age.) Bagg’s argument lands in familiar territory for anyone who’s wrestled with the cyborg metaphor. Both reject the assumption that better information alone will save us from ourselves, whether from context collapse or the dualisms (binaries, heh) that structure how we think about technology, nature, humanity and politics.

Bagg arrives at something parallel from political science: We trust information that affirms the groups we belong to. (Business and marketing, for what it’s worth, tell us the same thing from a slightly different angle: you’re most likely to convert on a recommendation from a trusted friend. The next best thing in our current media landscape: a trusted influencer you identify with, which is why TikTok increasingly feels like QVC.) The problem isn’t that people lack access to truth, it’s that they’ve lost affinity with the experts, institutions and collaborative practices that produce expertise.

Both perspectives point toward the same conclusion: you have to recognize shared affinities through the slow work of creating conditions where people want to trust each other across differences.

The trust gap

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:30:00 -0500

I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than men—25 percent lower on average—in part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social media experiences tend to be more open to AI, while Americans’ distrust is shaped by years of watching tech platforms erode trust. Meanwhile, one of the largest social platforms has turned its AI chatbot into a harassment tool—generating roughly one nonconsensual sexualized deepfake image per minute, disproportionately targeting women and girls.

When platforms enable abuse at scale, it makes sense that people most likely to be harmed would be most attuned to ethical concerns, and would thus be the most cautious about AI adoption.

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:59:46 -0500

Determined to finish at least one more novel this year, and this one fits the bill. Currently reading: Moderation by Elaine Castillo 📚

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:02:40 -0500

This book isn’t in Epilogue so I can’t log it properly, but it’s an okay primer on change communication. For higher ed, the emphasis on engaging leadership and governance is handy. 📚

Rhetoric of intertextuality

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:36:20 -0500

“… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:38:52 -0500

I met a friend for dinner, we had a time, and as she left she mentioned her long-time book club and how much everyone hated their latest read. What was it? I asked. She said, “Have you heard of ‘The Heart in Winter’?” 😭

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:56:18 -0500

“In 2024, there were a total of 454 words used excessively by chatbots, the researchers report.” When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 15:14:02 -0500

Currently reading: Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall 📚

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 12:13:04 -0500

The education sector is a big target for cyber attacks, with higher ed being one of the largest and most sensitive targets for bad actors. A recent study shows that education is unprepared as a sector and many institutions lack resources to support a thoughtful and robust cybersecurity program.

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:45:27 -0500

Of course Jean Grae has a striking narrative voice and point of view. My hero. Currently reading: In My Remaining Years by Jean Grae 📚

Fri, 23 May 2025 12:41:33 -0500

Currently reading: Communication Solution by Stacy Smulowitz 📚

Tue, 20 May 2025 09:16:01 -0500

This book has some decent insights, especially on how to refine your leadership “brand” in the workplace and online, but I’m not sold yet. Currently reading: When We’re in Charge by Amanda Litman 📚

Wed, 14 May 2025 08:57:19 -0500

Currently reading: In My Remaining Years by Jean Grae 📚

Tue, 13 May 2025 20:56:44 -0500

Currently reading: When We’re in Charge by Amanda Litman 📚

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:58:27 -0500

Private group chats are as maddening as public social media - and much harder to track. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:23:50 -0500

Vonnegut captures today’s tech zeitgeist in a science fiction tale - written seventy years ago. Apparently he wrote it during his time at GE, inspired by their rush to automation. Finished reading: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut 📚

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:20:42 -0500

Wherein the protagonist turns a blob into the man of her dreams. Currently reading: Blob by Maggie Su 📚

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 16:25:47 -0500

Currently reading: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut 📚

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:23:49 -0500

Needed this vibe. Currently reading: An Immense World by Ed Yong 📚

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 17:20:13 -0500

The bureau speak is v amusing. Currently reading: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley 📚

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 17:19:04 -0500

Finished reading: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 📚

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 17:19:27 -0500

Book club categorically disliked this one. Finished reading: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry 📚

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 18:38:53 -0500

Dang, this is good. Currently reading: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 📚

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:25:08 -0500

Finished reading: Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange 📚

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 01:18:00 -0500

Finished reading: Lit by Mary Karr 📚

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:30:43 -0500

Finished reading: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates 📚

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:03:40 -0500

Finished reading: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt 📚

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 10:06:13 -0500

Currently reading: Abortion by Jessica Valenti 📚

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 13:32:31 -0500

Finished reading (a couple of months ago): Holding It Together by Jessica Calarco 📚

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:54:21 -0500

Read this in one sitting, reminded of “The Fire Next Time” in both style and urgency. Finished reading: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates 📚

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:05:55 -0500

Finished reading: On Writing by Stephen King 📚

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 14:33:27 -0500

Finished reading: James by Percival Everett 📚

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 10:17:06 -0500

Currently reading: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories by Lorrie Moore 📚

⚡ Acceleration

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 14:39:27 -0500

This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to perform our work and extend our social lives are increasingly used to scam us.

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 09:40:48 -0500

I read this again after a twenty year break. It holds up, but wowzers, my takeaways were different in 2024. Finished reading: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant 📚

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 13:56:30 -0500

In relationship to collectors, purchases of physical media are on the rise, with vinyl outselling everything, and cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs making a comeback. I’m a longtime downloader and streamer, but have been buying vinyl lately myself. Indicative of lost trust in Big Tech?

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:10:08 -0500

A clever look at feminist theory through celebrity case studies. My favorite chapters were on humor, leadership and nudity.

Finished reading: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen 📚

Girl in a Band

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:19:07 -0500

A quick read by a singular voice, heavy on descriptions of the New York art and music scene of the 90s. Like many punk memoirs, it’s a tribute to the many names that made the movement and a memorial for a city that no longer exists. Gordon’s voice is kind and bold, curious and smart. Her descriptions of growing up in LA and coming of age in New York are painterly and poetic. Her takes are generous for all but one person: her ex-husband.

All my respect to her for opening and closing the books with her raw reflections on Thurston’s mundane and deeply uncool betrayal.

Finished reading: Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon 📚

Fri, 31 May 2024 15:27:42 -0500

Why are divorce memoirs stuck in the 1960s? A fair question, I say. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/2…

The relevance of these authors, imo, is about women’s buying power in the ex-evangelical and ex-Mormon movement. But I think it’s pretty difficult to think publicly about ideas like liberation or, say, bodily autonomy when you aren’t regularly entertaining trans politics or questioning carceral politics.

⚡ Bookshelves

Fri, 31 May 2024 14:17:37 -0500

The Bookshelves feature of Micro.blog is easily my favorite of this platform. It sits right at the intersection of medium and function: as a reader I want to keep track of things, but I don’t need so much infrastructure around it. Just some checkmarks and a place to dash off my immediate thoughts.

I’ve been keeping my virtual bookshelf up to date while pushing myself to take on a bunch of literary fiction, but I’m tired, reader. So instead of laboring on with a pile of good books I didn’t really want to read, I lined up a bunch of rock n’ roll memoirs for the summer while I manifest camping, hammocks and time otherwise spent by a lake.

Thu, 23 May 2024 08:14:38 -0500

I very much enjoyed this book. Despite the heavy subjects, ultimately culminating in a reflection on the ongoing conflict in Palestine that can’t be missed, it was a compelling read that I’ve returned to many times as a reference. The mirror as metaphor for the inexplicable stories in the news.

Finished reading: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein 📚

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 13:23:05 -0500

Light and clever enough for an easy read, while serious enough to hold my attention. Love the demonstrations of mutual care on the margins of polite society.

Finished reading: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 📚

🧶 Craft Work: On a Joann's bankruptcy and the struggling retail craft market

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:52:58 -0500

The internet says Joann fabrics is going to declare bankruptcy, putting a huge market of individual crafters without access to in-person retail craft spaces into a tailspin. It’s likely they will ask their creditors to restructure their debt, making them able to keep some stores open. The whole market relies heavily on in-person shopping (it’s a textural and sensory shopping experience, which is the point!) and hasn’t pivoted well to e-commerce.

This is one of my favorite pet subjects. Globally, the arts and crafts market overwhelmingly caters to women and children and it’s HUGE, commanding a very dedicated and loyal customer base. And still, it struggles.

Despite an influx of crafters during the shutdown, retail craft stores have struggled to strike a balance between sustainable e-commerce and in-person retail strategies. Other issues: For months after the pandemic, the Joann’s in my neighborhood struggled to keep the place stocked and staffed, exacerbated by skyrocketing shipping costs and shifts in the retail worker market after the shutdowns. Kids went back to school, cooling the market for arts and crafts activities on which to spend their time. And with lagging incomes and cost of living increases eating into people’s spending money, customers just don’t have the bandwidth they may be used to.

In my experience, customers don’t love shopping at a Michaels or a Joann’s, but they appreciate the ability to get what they need, mostly on demand, and to do so in-person where you can handle the materials before you buy them. Fiber arts people, for example, put a lot of importance on the weight, texture and color of their tools and materials - and for good reason! Pleasant tools make for a pleasant experience - and for pleasant outcomes. Indie retailers corner this market by keeping inventory low, building relationships with customers, creating affinity using social media marketing and by nurturing community with digital learning and forums. Crafters from around the world can share tricks, tools, patterns and finished items with like-minded people. The large-scale retailers can’t compete with that and haven’t really tried.

It’s unclear what’s next, but I’m thinking of all the people who live in places that can’t sustain a standalone fabric or yarn store. Rural makers can sometimes find tools and materials in resale markets like Facebook Marketplace, and sometimes you can find decent stuff at the local flea, or at specialty shop, such as a small machine repair shop that works on sewing machines. A lot of those folks won’t have a store to go to, and will have to travel to shop in person or resort to online retailers that don’t meet their needs.

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 13:40:00 -0500

I’ve been waiting for this one because it’s a story I know well. It is an impeccably reported book covering how young women navigated a compromised, stigmatized, coercive landscape around unplanned pregnancies in the late 20th century. Sisson is a comprehensive writer whose reporting is deeply empathetic, based on her personal experience as an activist and academic working in reproductive justice alongside extensive research. She discusses the history of the adoption movement at length, connecting it to other institutional family separation movements, and considers it alongside the choice to abort unplanned pregnancies and against the decision to parent anyway, often in a deeply compromised social and political climate.

My deep appreciation to her for telling these stories and telling them well.

Currently reading: Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson 📚

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:00:56 -0500

Embarking on a little side quest, which shifts my normal reading list from whatever it is now to a list of water metaphors.

Hidden Systems

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:40:45 -0500

My delightful book club pulled this YA graphic novel out of the 2023-24 “best of” lists and loved it. There is a remarkable amount of information on each page - truly, you could build a dynamic reading curriculum off of each section - between the written and visual communication. A triumphant example of quality science writing, a great gift book, suitable for just about any audience over the age of ten.

Finished reading: Hidden Systems by Dan Nott 📚

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 19:36:24 -0500

The new provost is an interesting person and an ultra-charismatic speaker, which makes for a p good podcast. madison.citycast.fm/podcasts/…

U of M not selling student data (yet)

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:54:15 -0500

This story spun up yesterday with broad outcry from academics, and with good reason. Institutions needs to define and clarify their relationship to tech in order to assuage ongoing concerns about monetization in a fast-moving landscape. gizmodo.com/universit…

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:22:16 -0500

This is the kind of book that connects the dots on some big ideas, primarily how traditional gender roles intersect with capitalism to produce the economy, and in turn, how these systems, tensions and behaviors then reproduce inequality. It’s also, at the root, about how ideas form reality. By reframing some of the feminist classics - and the Marxist ones, too - the writers recast some of our old stories about how the world works, and set up a framework for future scholarship across a number of disciplines.

This is an intensely academic and dialectical book by some of the best thinkers who work at the intersection of Marxism and feminism, and worthwhile for anyone thinking about how work, labor, gender, sex, and culture press on the individual and the collective alike.

If this feels too heavy but you like the subject, check out the editor’s prior book, “Feminism for the 99%.” It’s similar in form to bell hooks’ classic “Feminism is for Everybody” but with a clear collectivist and activist call to action.

Finished reading: Social Reproduction Theory by Tithi Bhattacharya 📚

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:11:42 -0500

The (very decorated) author (his first novel) spent time on the faculty in my Big Ten hometown. I already recognize some of the side characters. 👀 Currently reading: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar 📚

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:09:38 -0500

Escapist and breezy. Finished reading: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams 📚

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:09:04 -0500

This smart graphic novel zooms in and out on engineered systems happening all around us: electricity, water, the internet. Fascinating and clever. Currently reading: Hidden Systems by Dan Nott 📚

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 17:35:40 -0500

Finished reading: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 📚

I liked this one mostly because it asks nothing of the reader, save for enduring the completely unnecessary side story about the biographer.

Goodreads never did anything for me

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 17:34:07 -0500

I just spent a pile of money on books, with the goal of reading for pleasure every day, and with the intention of sprinkling some light stuff around my generally serious reading preferences. While I usually read like a dad, heavy on the serious memoirs and book-length nonfiction explainers, I’m trying to take on some lighter reads because mom needs a little sugar with her medicine.

So far, I’m doing an okay job of keeping track of my reading habits here, which is why I ponied up for a paid membership to this site at all: flotisserie.micro.blog/books/

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 09:58:34 -0500

Devastating, bleak, relentless.

Finished reading: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan 📚

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 11:20:23 -0500

Currently reading: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan 📚

Dystopian, but not so far away.

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 10:30:00 -0500

The local story is ripe with corruption. Indiana likes to spin up private “growth” orgs to bypass legislation, after a long history of treating the state’s water resources like something between a highway and a sewer. Indiana’s Plan to Pipe In Groundwater for Microchip-Making Draws Fire

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:26:37 -0500

“The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” My Unraveling, by Tom Scocca for NYMag

Best New (to me) Books of 2023

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 17:14:04 -0500

After a stint as an English major and as a writer myself, I got into a habit of reading dozens of articles a day instead of longer form writing: books. I spent a lot of energy in 2023 getting back to books. Thanks to a great book club (you know who you are) and making space to settle in with a great book in a cozy spot, here are my favs from 2023:

📚 Monica Potts, “The Forgotten Girls”

I’ve followed Potts’ career since she was a student blogger turned journalist in the aughts, so seeing her publish this book was a little personally gratifying, too. Potts brings her reporting background to this memoir about coming of age in Arkansas, one of the poorest, reddest states, with lengthy explorations of the economic and social policies that create conditions in which women struggle to thrive. She compares her childhood against a friend who didn’t get out of dodge, and explores what makes the difference in areas where people get left behind.

I really enjoyed this read for so many reasons, and was pleased that Potts’ voice is empathetic, smart and searching despite the challenging material. A mix of memoir and sociology. Very recommended.

📚 Timothy Egan, “A Fever in the Heartland”

In the roaring twenties, my home state of Indiana was a hotbed of racist activity. The KKK rose to their peak power with something like one in three adult Hoosiers counting themselves among their ranks, by leveraging evangelical churches, law enforcement, and local politicians to curry influence and power. This is ultimately a story about a deathbed testimony that broke the spell, when the telling of the Grand Dragon’s secrets, cruelties and perversions finally brought a public reckoning with the Klan.

📚 Barbara Kingsolver, “Demon Copperhead”

Like Dickens did with “Copperfield,” Kingsolver does with “Copperhead.” This novel explores how institutional poverty harms children, set in an American South that, frankly, felt familiar coming from the lower Midwest. It lives up to the hype and was vindicating and familiar. I listened to this audiobook on a long road trip and the narrator nailed it.

(I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. I finished this and turned around and reread “Poisonwood Bible” - about the hubris of American missionaries in Congo - on a camping trip. It holds up.)

📚 Britney Spears, “The Woman in Me”

Yanno, I didn’t think this would be on my list either, but here we are. Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship and stole her time, money and autonomy. Consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. It’s neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors she’s weathered right under our noses. It’s giving “Yellow Wallpaper,” but pop. Free Britney.

📚 Patrick Radden Keefe, “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty”

This is a giant tome of a book that nevertheless provides a riveting and thorough history of who knew what when and why it matters. It’s also a study of impunity among the super-rich, and how their money and influence reaches into the public commons. It turns out a lot of modern fiction deals with addiction, opioids in particular, so this became a foundational book for a lot of other reads on this year’s list.

If you don’t want to read the book, but want to know more about the Sacklers and their terrible, coercive global influence, don’t miss the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which follows artist, activist and addict Nan Goldin as she fights against and grieves for all that opioids have taken from her, and from us. It’s a beautiful testament to art, community and the disenfranchised - and currently streaming on MAX.

I’m building my list for 2024, so let me know what you recommend!

Indiana, the KKK, and me

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 13:10:31 -0500

Currently reading: A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan 📚

Despite being from Indiana, I feel like I’ve heard very little about this book, which covers the rise of the Indiana KKK in the early 1900s. The book’s central story revolves around the Grand Dragon, a bad man whose bad acts finally land him in enough trouble that the powers that be couldn’t ignore his non-KKK activities any longer. The point, however, is that they ignored most of his activities because institutional power was both in the Klan’s pocket and was leveraged to recruit members up and down the state. Egan takes a powerful, uncomfortable look at how the KKK organized white, Protestant people against everyone else using social and professional organizations and churches, and how they helped shape neighborhood vigilantes into police forces tasked with protecting property and morality.

Fellow Hoosiers will recognize a lot of familiar names, towns and players. That photo in the NYT book review was taken in Marion, Indiana, for example. I’m finishing up an anecdote that takes place in Logansport. New Castle, Muncie, Ft. Wayne, Terre Haute are also places of interest. A reader on Twitter reminded me that the KKK tried to purchase Valaparaiso University, once one of the most prestigious private universities this side of the Mississippi. Examples abound. It’s unsurprising to read that Indianapolis was nearly taken over by the Klan in the 1920s, considering how many in the statehouse openly endorse exclusionary opinions today.

Britney's Yellow Wallpaper

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:03:00 -0500

Finished reading: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears 📚

Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship, and consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. It’s neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors she’s weathered.

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 17:06:56 -0500

Finished reading: The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts 📚

Potts brings her reporting background to this memoir about coming of age in Arkansas, one of the poorest, reddest states, with lengthy explorations of the economic and social policies that create conditions in which women struggle to thrive. I really enjoyed this read for so many reasons, and was pleased that Potts’ voice is empathetic, smart and searching. Very recommended.

More human and humane

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 23:44:00 -0500

Hilariously (sadly? regretfully?), since I’ve been writing online for public audiences since about 1997, I’ve been thinking about the art of posting, community building, and who benefits and how, for a very long time. All of this (https://blog.ayjay.org/the-three-paths-of-micro-blog/) sounds about right, specifically:

“…it will — by design — never be a place for you to monetize your brand, troll, shitpost, or become an influencer. But hey, there are plenty of other platforms better suited for that kind of thing. Micro.blog is better suited for the more human and humane paths I have identified here.”

Very excited for the movie

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:24:33 -0500

Finished reading: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann 📚

“For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.

“Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots—after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state—did police departments emerge in the United States.”

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 11:20:37 -0500

Microblogging on the open web - and why care? book.micro.blog

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:24:47 -0500

While noodling around on other things, I ran across the omg.lol domain (https://home.omg.lol/), clicked around, found Neatnik (https://neatnik.net/), and this fun PHP project where he created a year-long calendar that automatically resizes to fit a single page.

See the whole year on one sheet of paper. Any sheet of paper: neatnik.net/calendar/

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 19:50:45 -0500

Finished reading: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin 📚

When I realized I’ve read more about him than by him, I had to rectify that problem. So many of the geopolitical problems he discusses are still relevant, and Baldwin’s voice is as clear and urgent as ever.

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 18:08:30 -0500

Finished reading: Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver 📚

It holds up.

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 18:07:54 -0500

Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚

I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. After I finished this one on a road trip, I turned around and reread Poisonwood Bible on a camping trip.