Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • freebird / against professional accomplishment

    Been pretty quiet here of late, as I’ve been grinding away at the last cluster of academic commitments on my desk, trying to get free of the backlog so I can leave the building without the waiter chasing after me with the bill, so to speak. Along the way, there have been a number of…

  • making them seem insurmountable

    A new Laleh Khalili joint at NOEMA: … what if infrastructure is designed, financed and adopted into the habits of everyday lives of its users in such a way that it is not a harbinger of apocalypse? I fear that thinking of infrastructures in a generalized and totalizing way, as always only girding the structures…

  • happy (belated) blogday

    The arrival of a domain renewal notice by email reminded me that yesterday was VCTB’s 17th birthday. I bought the domain in March 2006, in order to map what was then still a Blogspot-based site onto a digital room-of-my-own. I don’t recall how quickly I then moved to using self-hosted WordPress, but I know it…

  • a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors

    Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: For me, the big question isn’t whether Jonathan Chait (or Glenn Greenwald, or name any other extremely online person who you think is a controversialist or party hack) is an innately terrible human being. It’s why we have a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors (whether…

  • a clear parable of power

    Raising my head briefly above the palisade*, here, to clip a couple of paragraphs from an excellent (and, unusually, free-to-air) essay at the Paris Review, which is apparently a tweaked version of an introduction by Michael Tondre for a new edition of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the foundational petro-novel. You should read the whole thing, as…