One of my favorite albums of 2016 was Real Enemies by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, an ambitious, big jazz record that takes American conspiratorial thinking as its motivating theme. (It’s true: we’ll make up our secret societies if we have to.) It has held up really well, and it’s worth hunting down a copy.

Argue’s group performed this weekend at Columbia’s Miller Theater, and although they didn’t play music from that release, they played some material that builds upon its rich harmonic toolkit. In the first half of the show, Argue explained that he had written “All In” for the late Laurie Frink, who played with the Secret Society on their first album. Fittingly, it featured trumpeter Nadje Noordhuis (whose note-bending is really something) and captures a lot of the enigmatic, almost tenebrous sound of Real Enemies.

A Puckish narrator, Argue noted that the song “Codebreaker” was written to honor the decisive contributions of Alan Turing and that “Transit” was inspired by the now-defunct Fung Wah Bus, the beloved Boston-New York Chinatown shuttle that was a staple of Boston-area undergraduate life. (Speaking not just for myself here, I take it!)

The show’s second half was entirely taken up by an Ellington-inspired forty-minute piece “Tensile Curves.” Lots of great clarinet work by Sam Sadigursky and drumming by Jon Wikan. I was especially captured by the last few minutes—the slow tempo and harmonic material reminded me of, say, a dark take on Bill Evans.

Secret’s out: these guys are good. Catch them if you can.

Following up on my previous post, I’ve pulled together just a few RSS feeds from some sites in classics and philosophy that help me stay on top of newly published research. To fetch these feeds, I use Newsblur, easily the best RSS reader I’ve found since Google Reader got axed.¹

Two important subscriptions for book reviews:

There are regular updates to the feeds for Bryn Mawr Classical Review (feed) and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (feed). These two outlets publish lots and lots of reviews of new monographs, and I find it pretty essential to use RSS to stay on top of the steady deluge of postings.

Easy feeds from open-access outlets:

Some open-access journals like Philosophers’ Imprint (feed) and Informal Logic (feed) and Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (feed) provide RSS feeds for their latest issues, including links to PDF versions of full articles. Journals don’t publish as often as the above book review sites, but when a new issue comes out, you’ll know right away.

Traditional (i.e., not open-access) journals are far less likely to publish feeds for their new articles, I imagine largely on account of paywalls found at the majority of academic publishers. After a quick peek at, say, Classical Quarterly or Arion, I can’t find feeds to stay on top of their latest articles. A real bummer.

A couple semi-solutions for journals without feeds:

Philosophy as a discipline seems to be much savvier as far as distributing new research on-line. Brian Leiter, to take one example, recently linked to a new service called “Philosophy Paperboy” which bills itself as a “newspaper for philophers.” It pulls from a huge variety of journals and posts a list each day of newly published material.

I find the Paperboy site to be a great resource, if a bit overwhelming—I’d like to have some granular control over how many journals I receive updates from. And Philosophy Paperboy unfortunately doesn’t publish its own RSS feed of updates, so you need to visit the site every day to check for publications.

Instead of Paperboy, I use PhilPapers, the discipline-wide and (as far as I can tell) widely used site for finding and archiving philosophy research. (It’s a little bit like arxiv, but for philosophy.) In addition to hosting copies of new research, PhilPapers also allows users to create custom RSS feeds to receive notifications of new research from specific journals. Although it doesn’t seem to create RSS feeds for individual journals (e.g., Mind), you can nevertheless set up a feed for a collection of your favorite journals—one that might be a little more manageable than the firehose over at Philosophy Paperboy.

While logged into PhilPapers, you can open their list of “New Journal Articles”, where you’ll find in the right sidebar a section for a “Custom Filter.” In that sidebar, you’ll want to click on “edit” next to “My journals.”:

You’ll then find a (very long) list of all the journals that PhilPapers monitors, and you can check which ones you’d like to receive updates on. Once you save your journals, you can return to the “New Journal Articles” page and look again in the right sidebar for the feed to monitor your custom list of publications:

What about classics journals?

As I mentioned above, philosophy as a discipline seems to have a lot more technological infrastructure for keeping up with research—I find PhilPapers really impressive and helpful. But less philosophically inclined classicists can piggyback on some of these resources. Because of significant disciplinary overlap, you’ll find several classics-related journals at PhilPapers, and you can add them to your custom RSS feed. In that long list of journals that PhilPapers monitors, you’ll find Classical Quarterly and Arion, yes, as well as Classical World, the American Journal of Philology, and several others. A lot of the really big classics journals, however, aren’t there—no TAPA, no Arethusa, no Gnomon.

That’s all for The Awl. This week the outlet—not sure whether you’re supposed to call it a  “general interest” website or a media blog or?—announced that it plans to close up shop at the end of the month: “For nearly a decade we followed a dream of building a better Internet, and though we did not manage to do that every day we tried very hard and we hope you don’t blame us for how things ultimately turned out.”

The closure was covered heavily—more than I expected even knowing that the site was, at least to a limited degree, the terrain of media insiders. Yes, it was popular in certain New York City circles and cracked jokes according to a certain New York City humor and even had reviews of New York City weather! (“deliberately obtuse and staunchly the opposite of weather prediction.”) But it was swiftly mourned in The New York Times and The New Yorker, these laments popping up almost like pre-written obits for serious cultural cornerstones.

I don’t think these prompt eulogies are out of place, however, even if it’s easy to dismiss them as signs of coastal cliquishness. (Disclaimer: The nice folks at The Awl let me write a couple brief posts for their site.) Instead, the Internet’s writers—at the Times and elsewhere—are discovering that the web is increasingly calcified, without many places to post weird, smart prose. On-line media now operates by the laws of virality and reliable appeal, so literary, existential weather reviews (e.g.) aren’t going to survive.

It’s a real bummer because it all means that the Internet is becoming boring and predictable.

Jia Tolentino analyzed The Awl’s plight through a similar lens: “in 2018, the economics of online publishing are running everyone off the map.” She explains earlier:

Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal.

Tolentino’s assessment—the quirky, inquisitive genre of blogs vs. the “newsy, reactionary” genre of social media—reminded me of something that Timothy Burke from Swarthmore wrote earlier this very week about his own Internet writing habits:

It’s not clear to me any longer what good I can contribute as a public diarist. Much of what I think gets thought and expressed by someone else at a quicker pace, in a faster social media platform. More importantly, the value of my observations, whatever that might be, was secured through combining frankness and introspection, through raising rather than brutally disposing of open questions. This more than anything now seems quaintly out of place in social media. I feel as if it takes extreme curation to find pockets of social media commentary given over to skepticism and exploration, through collectively playful or passionate engagement with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Both of these posts draw attention to social media’s ascent and its omnivorous, impatient orientation. On the one hand, it is “decontextualized” and therefore has the potential not just for a “general” but even for a universal appeal. It doesn’t ask us for “introspection”; it blurts out “what’s happening in the world right now,” but unfortunately what’s happening in the world right now is consistently regrettable tweeting.

There’s some serious reckoning to do about on-line media—the ways it’s written, distributed, consumed—and there’s no way to accomplish all that in one way-past-my-bedtime blog post. I don’t mean to sketch a kind of Luddite argument here against Facebook, and I’m maybe just restating some element of that DFW “Inverse Cost and Quality Law” but for writing on the Internet. But one thing that definitely comes to mind, more generally, is the Awl tagline (or supplication or demand): “Be Less Stupid.” To borrow some of Burke’s terminology above, people have got to seek out “exploration” and “frankness” on the web, not just stumble into ICQL-driven, algorithmically rewarded anti-content.

To clarify: I don’t mean more people should have read The Awl. I do mean some people should read some odd duck sites like The Awl. I don’t know, think about using an RSS reader and then read into existence the Internet you want.