In the midst of putting together a Summer Reading List for 2004, I took a lengthy Summer trip, delaying the release of this list until long after summer was officially over. Here, now, is the list of recommended I accumulated and sat on for far too long. Additions and corrections were made in the meantime. Many apologies for the delay, and many thanks to all those who participated. Read more

For the past three years, Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series has been quietly building an arsenal of some of the most interesting collaborations available on wax. They’ve teamed up their Blue Series Continuum jazz band with innovative rappers, producers, and musicians including Antipop Consortium, El-P, DJ Wally, Saul Williams, Meat Beat Manifesto, and DJ Spooky, among many others. The results are neither Hip-hop nor Jazz, but ride the lines between those and several other genres. Read more

Steven Johnson calls him “the Lou Reed of the new gaming culture.” Eric Zimmerman hops through the realms of game design, academe, writing, game advocacy, and entrepreneurship as if he’s playing a game of hopscotch. And, in many ways, he is. He’s spent the last decade designing award-winning games, teaching at places like MIT, New York University, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design at the New School University, as well as writing continuously about gaming — much of which can be seen in four recent books: RE: Play (Peter Lang, 2003), Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003), First Person (MIT Press, 2004), and Brenda Laurel’s Design Research (MIT Press, 2003). In 2000, he and Peter Lee founded the game development company gameLab, which develops games for the computer and beyond. Read more