Brad Johnson

@ahablives.bsky.social

1164 Followers 180 Following

A part of the Twitter Diaspora. Also run East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, CA - @ebbooksellers.bsky.social

Photo of Alexis Shotwell’s forthcoming LIBERATION IS OTHER PEOPLE.
In an age when it seems endless, it's easy to forget one of the fundamental, thermodynamic rules of our universe also applies to information. Namely, that accumulation and complexity always mask a more enduring, entropic loss. Thomas S. Mullaney is a Stanford historian who knows a good deal professionally about information-loss, and with the death of his parents came face to face with it personally. His documenting of life -- one's own, another's, and indeed as a whole -- of life as a mode of information accumulating and unravelling -- as built to disappear -- is as deeply thought as it is surprisingly moving. Coincidentally, I read his How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton & Co.) almost immediately after Peter N. Miller's considerably denser but no less delightful On Conservation as a Human Science (Princeton University Press). Both Mullaney and Miller present as a core human question: what's really & may yet still be left behind in the ruins of history recent and long past? Our current environmental, social, and political conditions lend an immediacy to what we might otherwise opt to defer. All this is to say, I'm very excited that we're co-hosting Thomas S. Mullaney with Local Economy on Thursday, July 9th (6-7:30pm). He will be in conversation with Tamara Kneese, whose book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press) provides an ethnographic and historical account of the internet of death.
Flock cameras captured over 600 million license plates in Oakland last year Only a small fraction of the plates were associated with criminal suspects, according to police.
Vanilla Ice Is In, Bret Michaels Is Out: Trump's Battle for Celebrity Validation President Trump has pursued fame his entire adult life. Now in his second term, he is finding how little power he has to force cultural figures to fall in line.
OPINION GUEST ESSAY I'm the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. The A.l. Job Apocalypse Is Overblown. May 22, 2026, 11:00 a.m. ET
Just two self-deprecating, egotistical bros hanging.
There’s simply so much happening, isn’t there? So many demands for action and attention that even their visible affects feel unevenly distributed. Fury needs the counterweight of patience; as patience needs the prodding of urgency; and both sorrow and joy require perspective. People used to call this balancing act wisdom. Maybe they still do. It’s hard to tell sometimes over the clamor of nonsense and information. It’s become so much, in fact, that they’re promising to build yet more and better machines to do the work for us. Which might in theory be great if it wasn’t itself a more algorithmically complex, energy inefficient cacophony.
“The notion of (technologized) convenience centers consumerism, which places it as a presumptive social good. However, a premise underpinning this book is that technologies of convenience seldom live up their billing. As Jenny Huberman points out, it is essential to subject the concept to ideological inter-rogation. She muses: “What exactly is convenience? How does convenience operate not just as a highly coveted consumer good that stands to mitigate the demands of life in a fast-paced society, but also as an ideology that is integral to attempts to justify new forms of capital accumulation, domination, and extraction?” Certainly we can see that a vast array of predatory anti-consumer policies and practices are flourishing today. In the realm of customer service, something that is presented as a convenience may or may not be, but one can be absolutely sure that it constitutes a profit source to those heralding it.
Headline: “Trump threatens not to sign any bills until Congress approves strict voter ID act”
Headline that reads: "'End of an era': death of Khamenei seen as Iran's Berlin Wall moment."
THEY CAN'T UNDERSTAND By Anise (in the Seattle Union Record, the Labor Daily.) What scares them most is That makes them sullen That NOTHING HAPPENS! They are ready And SUSPICIOUS of us, Not any NATURAL depravity. For DISTURBANCES. It is the system They have machine guns That trains them to believe And soldiers, In the words of our But this SMILING SILENCE Beloved Ole, Is uncanny. That they can bring in Enough ARMED FORCE The business men To operate our industries. Don't understand But how many That sort of weapon. MACHINE GUNS It comes Will it take to cook From a DIFFERENT WORLD ONE MEAL? Than the world THEY live in. It is your SMILE It is really funny That is UPSETTING And a bit pathetic Their reliance To see how worried On ARTILLERY, brother! And MAD It is the garbage wagons The business men are getting. That go along the street What meetings they hold, Marked "EXEMPT What WILD RUMORS By STRIKE COMMITTEE." They use It is the milk stations To keep themselves STIRRED UP. That are getting better daily, And the three hundred Yet MOST of them WAR Veterans of Labor Might be real pleasant Handling the crowds HUMAN BEINGS WITHOUT GUNS, Except that life For these things speak Has separated them Of a NEW POWER Too much from common folks. And a NEW WORLD It is the SYSTEM That they do not feel Of industry At HOME in.
New York Times reporting: “The death count from Saturday's attack has risen to 80, between civilians and members of security forces, according to a senior Venezuelan official. He added that the number could rise further.”
From "Elegy in Joy" Muriel Rukeyser 1913 - 1980 We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer, or the look, the lake in the eye that knows, for the despair that flows down in widest rivers, cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace, all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
"Hi everybody -- I messed up today. Don't get me wrong, this happens often enough. But this was a bit different. While I don't mind saying No to people, I hate disappointing people due to poor communication. And that's what happened today. Somebody wanted something that proved to be difficult to get, and I failed to communicate that difficulty until it was too late. That's bad in itself, but it was meant to be a gift they'd given a lot of thought to. I especially respect good gifts that are not chasing a trend or some popular thing. And yet, in this instance, my poor communication registered as disrespect. Why do I tell you this? I'm not looking for semi-pubic absolution here. I suppose I just wanted to fess up to the fragility of the emphasis I place on the human-size & shape of what we do at EBB. Mistakes are made: wrong books are sometimes (if seldom) ordered, bad information given (or good information given bady), etc. On the abstract level, I can appreciate the authenticity of this sort of messiness. In the moment, well, not so much. Maybe this is because the heights of the human-sized, while often forgotten, are known to most of us deep in our bones. The joys at laughing at some silly thing with a stranger; falling in love, if for but a moment, with someone we've known forever, or perhaps will never see again; or even immediate, commiserate sorrow at some horrible, maybe unspeakable, thing. All told, maybe these accumulate to set the bar for what we come to expect of one another and of ourselves. As ever, I guess we take the good with the bad and try to leave things a little better. "