Author: Bobbie Johnson

Malcolm Harris on fossil fuel’s plan to profit from climate change

March 4, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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“Last fall, the Shell Scenarios team — as in Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest oil companies in the world — offered me £2,000 in exchange for a 15-minute talk and my participation in a group exercise. Its internal corporate think tank was holding a daylong conference about how generational change would affect the hopefulness projected in what the company calls the “Sky Scenario,” which it describes as “a technically possible but challenging pathway […]

BRB23: You always know, even when you don’t

January 22, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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The thing about being poor is that you never quite realize it until something happens—a moment of shame that puts you in your place, or an embarrassment that flushes your truth out for everyone to see.  The thing about being really poor, though, is that you realize it all the time. We veered between different points along the spectrum, traveling one way and another driven by the ups and downs of an economy nobody really […]

Life inside the book-to-film complex

January 15, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Very interested to read this James Pogue takedown of the explosion in non-fiction which is made to be sold to Hollywood (or whatever we call the Netflix-Apple-Hulu-Amazon-Hollywood machine these days.) While it’s somewhat flawed, possibly unfair to a number of authors, and more than a little self-serving, the essay does do a good job laying out an argument about a very specific kind of journalistic product. “The book-to-film complex is bolstered by two imperatives that […]

Out of copyright

January 8, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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This has just come to my attention from last year: 1923, a project by Parker Higgins to create magazines from material that was entering the public domain. There were several hundred genuine print subscriptions available through the project’s Kickstarter (long gone) but downloadable online. I hope he made it to the end of the year—the archive stops in October.

The old internet

January 3, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Katie Notopoulos gives a reasonable rundown of the web that used to exist before the 2010s (a wild and disintermediated place where independent creators had a chance to thrive) and the one that exists a decade later (centralized into a handful of aggregators and platforms that everyone is reliant on.) The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy […]

BRB 22: Definitely up there with 97 and 08

December 30, 2019
by Bobbie Johnson
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Newsletter

A man sits, hands hovering over a keyboard, puffy encircled eyes turned to a square of sky he witnesses through the window and between the rooftops. Over there, his kid watches The Simpsons. He’s really into The Simpsons right now. Over in the other direction, the kitchen is strewn with the debris of a Christmas season that has definitely been well spent, but is now definitely well spent. He recalls these twelve months that are crawling out of view. […]