Before we all take the nonhuman turn, perhaps we should revisit what being human means in the first place. The debate has a rich pedigree. Situating the humans among the animals, as well as among our machines, is as fraught a philosophical position as one is likely to find. What separates us? Language? Self-awareness? Consciousness? Suffering? The machines themselves? No one, from Descartes and Kant to Heidegger and Levinas, seems to have a defensible answer. Two recent books explore the animal question in very different but interesting ways.
The human is …

No one can really tell you how to write. It’s a matter of finding what works for you. Since posting my last piece on writing, I talked to several people about their processes and remembered some things that should’ve been included last time around. I consider most of these higher-order aspects of the task, but they might not seem so to you. It all depends on where you are as a writer, and I’m not exactly an expert. Either way, this should be taken as an addendum to the other piece.

Writing …

Publishing has its problems. Academic publishing has its as well, and in turn public intellectualism has problems. With the rise of ebooks, self-publishing, blogging (oh, how I loathe that term), and the like, all of this seems to be coming to a head. I have chosen a path that attempts to eschew these issues. This is not to say that I am above academic publishing, but to say that I am not interested in being read by such a small audience. I am also not necessarily interested in scientific rigor …

I have a real hatred of false headlines, titles of articles that lie about their contents. The latest one to catch my ire was James Altucher’s “Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card.” Mainly because, well, it isn’t. As much as we may try with apps and QR-codes, as well as traditional things like stickers and postcards, there still isn’t a token of identity that works like a business card. I don’t wholly disagree with Altucher’s article, just the parts where he claims his headline. The article is …

If you’ve ever gotten the impression that the music industry is run by crooks, reading any part of Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men (Vintage, 1990) will more than confirm your suspicions. The false nostalgia some of us feel with the onset of the so-called digital age sees the past as something to which we need to return. A little research will dispel any delusions one might have about a golden age as far as the music industry is concerned. Nowhere is this feeling more prevalent than in Hip-hop. Ask anyone and they will …

I started writing poems and comics, and making fake newspapers at the age of six. Having grown up with an artist mom and always drawing, painting, or making something, I thought I’d end up an artist. I started making photocopied zines in my teens and taught myself how to turn events and interviews into pages with staples, but my driving interest (aside from the BMX, skateboarding, and music content that inspired those zines in the first place) was originally in the layouts. Balancing words and images on the page excited …

If bricolage is the major creative form of the twenty-fist century, then the archive is its standing reserves. Socrates famously worried about the stability of our memories as we moved from an oral to a written culture, and his concerns have been echoed in the move to digital archives. The pedigree of this technological Socratic shift is deep. When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll on December 6, 1877, he externalized and disembodied a piece of humanity. Jonathan Sterne writes that “media are forever setting …