User Profile

Jim Brown

jamesjbrownjr@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years ago

jamesjbrownjr.net English professor Teaches and studies rhetoric and digital studies Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center (DiSC): digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu

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Jim Brown's books

Currently Reading

2025 Reading Goal

48% complete! Jim Brown has read 25 of 52 books.

Samantha Harvey: Orbital (EBook, Grove Atlantic)

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize–winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation …

poetic prose and a compelling conceit

No rating

This book guides us through a a day in the life of a team of astronauts orbiting earth. But to it's a "day" is a bit misleading given how often the sun "rises" and "falls" on these characters. The book proceeds through 16 orbits, and it offers a map of those orbits at the beginning. But the book itself provides a map as well, constantly reminding the reader what part of the globe is passing underneath the international space station.

Beautifully written, and there are too many great moments to not them all here. But my favorite moment is this passage about Michael Collins famous photo of the lunar module leaving the earth's surface.

"In the photograph Collins took, there's the lunar module carrying Armstrong and Aldrin, just behind them the moon, and some 250,000 miles beyond that the Earth, a blue half sphere hanging in all blackness and bearing …

Anthony Stagliano: Disobedient Aesthetics (2024, University of Alabama Press) No rating

"experimental, creative, artistic research into control’s techniques and mechanisms"

No rating

This book analyzes a series of artistic interventions into surveillance technologies and, more broadly, technologies of control in order to theorize a "disobedient aesthetics" that looks for ways to move beyond the critique of such systems. From fabric that thwarts the thermal sensors of drones to various attempts to confound facial recognition systems (and ore), the book demonstrates how such efforts attempt to build a "redesigned being together."

The book is useful to those interested in how art can critique systems not by advocating for their removal but by reconfiguring relationships among people and technologies. It offers theoretical elaborations of and responses to Deleuze, Derrida, Shannon Mattern, and many others. It will be of particular interest to those studying rhetoric and digital media, but it also extends beyond those disciplinary boundaries.

reviewed Abundance by Derek Thompson

Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson: Abundance (2025, Simon & Schuster)

Center-left argument for "a liberalism that builds"

No rating

I was familiar with most of this argument from reading Ezra Klein's columns and listening to his podcasts (and, to a lesser extent, listening to Thompson's Plain English podcast). I am convinced by the argument: The U.S. political system has put up layers of barriers that prevent inventing, making, and building. From homes to public transportation systems, everything takes too long to build. The barriers were built with good intentions (environmental concerns, racial justice, supporting union labor), but we have reached a point where it is difficult to build what we need. And it is especially bad in cities and states run by Democrats.

I leave the book without a clear sense for how Klein and Thompson would guard against the problems of a "just build it" approach that emerged in previous years (highways built through Black neighborhoods, energy infrastructure built in those same neighborhoods because suburbs take a NIMBY …