Alex Sayf Cummings's Blog, page 5

Family Cars and Other Things Over Time: Mom and Me

Memories of mom, Monte Carlos, unions, Sunkist and struggle in 1970s Oxnard.

A Festus for the Rest of Us

Cults and multilevel marketing schemes are more American than apple pie, it turns out.

Geert Lovink and Tamara Kneese on Death and Digital Platforms

What happens to your online selfhood when you die?

AI and the End of Schooling

The power of AI to transform numerous fields of our society is not in question. How it will transform those fields is what the debate is all about.

Re-Visiting Poor Things: The Book vs. the Movie

Who would have thought a 1992 book by a writer who described himself as “a fat old asthmatic Glaswegian who lives by painting and writing” would be in the mix for Best Picture in 2024?

From the Jaws of Complete Victory: Or, It Feels Like a Capitulation Rather Than a Win

The California Faculty Association leadership failed its members, miserably.

We are bleeding and guns are our bandage

With the worst blizzard to strike Chicago in twenty years, I sat in the living room of a […]

Reimagining Resistance, Reconstructing Community: Farmworker Housing Cooperatives in Ventura, County, CA, 1965-1990

Since my early youth I always compared the homes and neighborhoods of people in my blue-collar social network with those more privileged.

Getting Wall-Eyed with Wall-E

I've gotten physically assaulted by anti-trans psychos twice in the last few months, but... like the limo driver in The Big Lebowski, I can't complain.

Old Formalists, New Content Creators

The sensibility of Gen Z is uncritical and anti-intellectual, assuming that everyone suffers from crippling anxiety and trauma, a sensitivity which any criticism might imperil.