Rob
@robarcand.bsky.social
phding @ mcgill | formerly pitchfork, spin | writer, editor, webdev, etc. | robarcand.info
Kyle Devine’s new book considers various efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across the music industry—while maintaining a healthy skepticism of climate solutionism. @robarcand.bsky.social reviews “Recomposed.”
It’s Not Easy Being Green | Rob Arcand
In his new book, Kyle Devine examines various efforts—and their shortcomings—to make the music industry greener.
thebaffler.com
is it honest? is it politically rigerous? is it methodologically interesting?
"Part of his appeal has long come from his music’s ability to combine narrative and political clarity with avant-garde, nonlinear form without sacrificing the wildness of his sounds" www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
Resistance Choirs | Nate Wooley
For centuries the Lenape people had hunting grounds and fishing camps in an area they called Penadnic, in the rocky hills of upper Manhattan. Wrested away
nybooks.com
end of the american century bsky.app/profile/fina...
Financial Times@financialtimes.com · last mo.Breaking news: Alan Greenspan, the US Federal Reserve chair who dominated global markets in the late 20th century only to see his legacy tarnished by the financial crash, has died at the age of 100. ft.trib.al/jmaaB1c
"Most urgently, galleries need to push for legally enforceable resale agreements that can block flipping and let them be less fearful of unknown potential clients. And galleries need to stop promoting art as an investment" www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/o...
Opinion | Art Galleries Are Not OK
nytimes.com
"Media technologies were used to expand the scope and scale of betting in horse racing in a second consequential way...photography is a cultural technique of what we understand today with the clunky term derivatization" doi.org/10.1215/1743...
All In: Derivative and Financialization in Sports Betting
Abstract. This article situates the recent explosion of online and app-based sports betting within longer histories of datafication and financialization in sports business and culture. The author trac...
doi.org
wild to me how silent critics have been (in the US at least + as far as i have seen internationally) about park chan-wook's NO OTHER CHOICE from last year--one of the best recent films about dispossession, proletarianization, and labor discipline by automation and ai
huge scoop (though i would imagine they're treading carefully), but what a legal mess! all in the name of "inevitability" ... newsletter.waterandmusic.com/archive/a-sc...
A scoop on Udio's upcoming app, Starstruck
Notes from a private Udio + Kobalt webinar.
newsletter.waterandmusic.com
“In [the yuppie-made 1980s], they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/o...
Opinion | How Yuppies Changed America
nytimes.com
«… if structuralism was correct, then LLMs are already AGI … If structuralism was correct, then LLMs would generate meaning, they would harbor an unconscious, they would participate in the symbolic order. Yet, since LLMs don't do any of those things … structuralism has a lot of explaining to do.»
Structuralism (Neo- or Paleo-) | Alexander R. Galloway
cultureandcommunication.org
"Perhaps what the score most resembles is a topographical map, with the arcs like a distant outcropping of mountains and the arrows at the bottom right bringing sketched-out directions to mind" harpers.org/archive/2026...
Sight and Sound, by Olivia Giovetti
The political possibilities of graphic notation
harpers.org
TODAY: @annamerlan.bsky.social on an extraordinary 1939 guide to New York City. “Reading the guidebook now gives the sense, not of a past city, but a parallel one, an unseen but strangely familiar river flowing just over the horizon.” flaminghydra.com/new-york-for...
New York, Forever Lost and Found
When I first moved to New York in 2009, the very first night I lay down to sleep in a coffin-narrow room in Harlem, I had a maddening sense of wonderful things happening just out of my reach: all the ...
flaminghydra.com
Resignation letters from UVA Rector and Vice Rector to Youngkin. Too long for full alts, but will post excerpts following.
One of the things that genuinely shocked me as I read through surveillance logs for the police is how much of their energy and attention is dedicated to shutting down vigils and other ceremonies of remembrance.
Lupita Nihongo@otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · 7mo agoAnyway ICE was filmed desecrating Renee Nicole Good’s memorial & doing violence to people who found that distasteful. Might be too soon to say if this falls into some kind of pattern of behavior if you’re the stupidest motherfucker on earth.
I helped organize this memorial zine to my beloved doctoral advisor @jonathansterne.bsky.social. Thanks to all the contributors for their beautiful offerings. Sound ON for silly, apropos page turning sound effects. intercomzine.com
Intercom! Zine
intercomzine.com
Warner is saying that any AI deals they'll agree to as a company will be opt-in only. That's consistent with the principles we all agreed to via Human Artistry Campaign. Even if you think gen AI music sucks, that's an important guardrail. www.wmg.com/news/growing...
Growing the Value of Music for Artists and Songwriters - Warner Music Group
AI is still in its early days. Investment is surging, talent is. . .
wmg.com
what would it take to reframe debates about streaming and cultural decline in marxist terms? for @nplusonemag.com i tried to think through the current crisis (AI! VC! A24!) and what a newly militant labor movement could mean for the culture industries www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
The Same Stream Twice | Rob Arcand
Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries. While P...
nplusonemag.com
I skipped this article for a while because I figured I'd read enough about the NYT's Mamdani coverage. I don't want to say the headline does the article a disservice - it is also very much about that - but goes well beyond as well
It's ME(Jaime)@exceedhergrasp1.bsky.social · 9mo agoThis is fucking brilliant, and you should read it: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...
MAMDANI CAME OUT TO JA RULE "NEW YORK" AND IMMEDIATELY QUOTED EUGENE DEBS
"The digital image is dead, long live whatever fluid vessel has taken its place this week." @robarcand.bsky.social reviews Hito Steyerl’s new collection, "Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-network-of-global-incinerators/
My friend @rorshock.bsky.social — CS undergrad, humanities PhD — has built a brilliant prgm @ The New School: “Code as a Liberal Art” nurtures “code + computational thinking as tools for critical + creative inquiry,” and as forces for 👍+👎 social change. His spring Software Engineering class looks 🌟
Software Engineering Applications
Software Engineering Applications Spring 2026 Code as a Liberal Art, Eugene Lang College, The New School This course gives students the opportunity to experience and critically examine the software e...
docs.google.com
