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Search Results for 'coronavirus'

“Trust your (foamy) immune system”

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2021 | 7 Comments »

“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]

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Post-pandemic, what will have changed?

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2021 | 2 Comments »

When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world […]

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Letter to a vaccine skeptic

Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2021 | 1 Comment »

The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of […]

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‘Do your own research’: Conspiracy practice as media virus

Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 5, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

Conspiracy movements like QAnon are a kind of cultural virus that spreads rapidly and widely in the new global media environment. Like invasive species, they spread into diverse cultural ecosystems, colonizing them even as they take on new forms that mimic each environment’s original inhabitants. To understand how they do this, we need to understand […]

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Buddscape

Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged , , , , , on December 10, 2020 | 2 Comments »

Harold Budd’s passing yesterday (from coronavirus complications) has inspired me to create a multichannel chamber of his music, which you can enter into and wander around in by clicking on the tabs below. Try them all at once, or mix channels at your leisure. His music, perhaps more than anyone’s, lends itself to this kind […]

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Truth, media trust, and the election

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

This article is cross-posted from the media ecologies blog e2mc. While last week’s election has resulted in the announcement of a new president and vice-president, with leaders of many countries around the world recognizing those results (and with global markets rallying their apparent support), the current Trump administration has not recognized them. As with the […]

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Generalized Floating Dread Event (GFDE)

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 30, 2020 | 2 Comments »

Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose […]

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An average (pandemic-era, pre-election) Sunday

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 26, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve begun posting updates on media coverage related to the U.S. presidential election (and related issues, such as social media disinformation) on my blog e2mc, which I’ve restarted to accompany my course “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.” Here is the latest post, which summarizes some key stories from yesterday’s Sunday New York Times. I may […]

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Diagnosing Trump-like derangement syndrome

Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

The Covid-19 situation in the United States, which has become the epicenter of new infections because of its flawed and chaotic response to the pandemic, is seen by some around the world as an emergency case of its own, requiring some sort of defensive response by countries that could become similarly infected. The Week‘s Ryan […]

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Russian roulette (on a daily basis)

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, tagged , on June 27, 2020 | 1 Comment »

Yesterday was a perfect illustration of how exciting (and bewildering) it can be to read the U.S. national news. Here’s a multiple-choice quiz about it. Which of the following occurred yesterday?

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We are all tuteishi (or, on not being posthuman)

Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about […]

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The week in a minute

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 7, 2020 | 3 Comments »

In a week of startling developments, some things still sound like they’re from The Onion. Or at least Harper’s Findings. They aren’t. In a week of police riots capping decades of ethnic violence in a country torn asunder by authoritarianism, a dismal economy, and plague, police responding to a bee sting were attacked by a […]

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