Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: General

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • tre år i Malmö

    I arrived in Sweden three years ago today. I’ve come to realise that one of my persistent discursive tics—one that very much predates the pandemic—is to observe that a given stretch of time “seems like a lifetime, but at the same time like a blink of the eye”. I say it because it feels true,…

  • structure & narrative

    Turns out that sometimes the old, non-metaphorical form of cut’n’paste is the only way to zoom out from the details of a complex story and see how you might fit it all together and make it work. I like to think I’m leaving this for myself as a sort of warning regarding excessive creative ambition,…