I just want to point out to readers that there has been all kinds of discussion around Dominic Boyer’s post on Neosocialism which has been disrupted by a slow server and an overly aggressive spam filter. I apologize to everyone whose messages have been disappeared by our totalitarian spam control Stasi. Curious that this [...]Yesterday I attended a looong seminar by an acquisitions editor of a university press in which he went over everything from how to revise your dissertation to how the covers of books get designed. It was a rare opportunity to hear from acquisitions editors what they were thinking about and how their job worked (thanks [...]Immortality, privatized space travel, organ ‘printing,’ seasteading, geoengineering, DIY human biology, and augmented humanism are some of the futurological imaginaires of a group of elite new media professionals and social entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. The values associated with these interests intersect with the ethics of technoprogressivism, the utopianism of transhumanism, and the social history of [...]Dominc Boyer of Rice University’s Anthropology Department has agreed to lay some wisdom on us over the next week or so. Dominic is the author of Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Please give him a savage welcome.
With Seeing Culture Everywhere behind us and Joana busy with Betterplace, we have been working together less than usual, but we do have plans. The shared denominator of our current interests is “development,” obviously a key term in Joana’s work with Betterplace and one that has been of increasing interest to Pal as Chinese migrants [...]Third Quarter Review: Hortense at jezebel.com took time out from the cheese balls and the nacho dip to file a report on the Superbowl 2010 commercials. Complete with embedded clips, Hortense shows that this year’s batch is dedicated to selling emasculated men products that will help them win back their manhood.
Haiti [...]I haven’t been blogging about the crisis in the UC system, mostly because excellent blogging is going on elsewhere (see esp. Chris Newfield and others at Remaking the University if you are interested). But when it intersects with anthropology, it warrants our attention. Paul Rabinow forwarded this tantalizing, if brief, note about [...]