What 90s alt rock radio, Woodstock 99, and the Telecom Act have to do with contemporary right-wing media

While I have your attention: now that writing is no longer something my day job pays me to do, I’ve decided to keep the newsletter free but set up a Kofi tip jar so that those who would like to leave a…

Elaine Miller Scholar Session at SPEP 2022: some reflections on the relationship between her work and mine

I had the fortune of attending the Scholar Session for Elaine Miller at the 2022 SPEP (well, at least most of it–I had to duck out for a meeting before the discussion got going). Scholar Sessions are sessions focused on…

Good Vibes Only: from a biopolitics of normalized frequency to a biopolitics of legitimate spatial orientation

It’s SPEP (Society for Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy) week, and it’s my 20th (more or less) SPEP—I gave my first SPEP paper in 2002 at the meeting in Chicago. Below is the paper I’m going to read this week in…

How to write an effective peer review report (for humanities & social sciences)

How to write an effective peer review report (for humanities & social sciences)

Peer reviewing is a common and essential part of everyday scholarly labor. But like many day-to-day academic activities, graduate programs rarely teach students how to be an effective peer reviewer. It’s mostly something you learn by inference as you read…

Obscenity is out, criminalization is in: what today’s moral panics about LGBTQ+ people have in common with post-identity resilience discourse

When I was growing up, my hometown was the epicenter of three moral panics about obscene sex that snowballed to the national stage: two grew so big they went to trial and became national media spectacles and one led to…

The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X and the fight for true independence—Final Draft Introduction

As many of you know I wrote a book on 97X WOXY–it’s all going through copy editing right now and should hopefully be out in the world as a printed Thing in spring 2023. In the meantime, however, I thought…

Vibes, Vectors, and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation

it’s the first draft of the introduction to the central chapter of my vibes book For decades, various counter- and sub-cultures used the term “vibe(s)” to describe what made them different from the mainstream. From hippies and their “good vibrations”…

SCOTUS to US: There is no such thing as civil society

The week of July 20, 2022, the US Supreme Court released a series of decisions about religious liberty, gun rights, and abortion rights that significantly reversed established precedent. The court ruled that (1) it’s an infringement on the free exercise…

What comes before vibes? On norms & psychophysical aesthesis

As I argued in my April 2022 essay in Real Life, norms are becoming less central to the patriarchal racial capitalist governance of inequality generally and sexuality in particular. This waning salience of norms is rooted in a shift in…

Some news

I am excited to announce that I am joining Palgrave Macmillan as Acquisitions Editor for Philosophy and Media & Cultural Studies. I’m looking forward to using my expertise in and passion for both these fields to help scholars publish impactful…