@rorotoko.com
Scholars, authors and artists on their own work, in their own words. A new thread every day, in three short parts, plus an archive of 2,000+ interviews going back to 2008. rorotoko.com
@rorotoko.comFrom the archive, 2018:
David A. Weintraub on how much we know about life on Mars, and how certain we are about it.
@rorotoko.com"Neutrality only serves the powerful few who are committing these crimes against the rest of us."
@toomanyspectra.bsky.social on astrobiology in a burning world.
@rorotoko.comThe Drake Equation tells us how many civilizations in the Milky Way we could talk to right now.
@toomanyspectra.bsky.social on why we can't.
Out from @princetonupress.bsky.social
@rorotoko.comFrom the archive, 2009:
Jeffrey G. Ogbar on hip-hop, from the minstrel show to Congressional hearings, and race as a touchstone of popular music.
@rorotoko.com"Hip-hop has also mobilized its own linguistic forms that are inscribed with temporal values."
Murray Forman on pioneers, veterans and OGs.
Out from @ucpress.bsky.social
@rorotoko.comWe picture aging blues and jazz musicians easily. A hip-hop artist in their seventies, less so, though the culture is over fifty.
Murray Forman on age and hip-hop.
Out from @ucpress.bsky.social
@rorotoko.comFrom the archive, 2023:
Robert Hassan on what it means to live as analog creatures in a society dominated by digital.
@rorotoko.com"[Analog] offers its own reward."
Darren Hudson Hick on finding an activity you love, then working out what you love about it.
Out from @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social
![“[Analog] offers its own reward.” Darren Hudson Hick](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:ukxpdszeaeyz6td2atwizaev/bafkreigzvjk65uuawmiz7bk2p5mapyrjiqmyeqvwzlcm4vdxves5mdcmgq@png)
@rorotoko.comTo write one chapter, Darren Hudson Hick bought a new board game "for research" and dictated the whole unboxing. About 700 words of it.
Out from @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social
@rorotoko.comFrom the archive, 2010:
Giorgio Bertellini on how early American cinema borrowed the Picturesque, and Italy, to picture racial difference.
@rorotoko.com"All are films that have changed the shape of what the medium of film can do."
Robert S. C. Gordon on the BFI Film Classics, and on De Sica's Bicycle Thieves.
@rorotoko.comBicycle Thieves was voted the best film ever made in 1952. Now it is cited with respect, and rarely studied.
Robert S. C. Gordon on why its famous simplicity is a sleight of hand.
@rorotoko.comFrom the archive, 2020:
@lucrichert.bsky.social on the "radical caucus" that tried to change American psychiatry, and the country, half a century ago.
@rorotoko.com"Words are power in Testament."
Tarik O'Regan on who gets to tell the story in his opera, and why Mary resists the men's version.
Photo Credit: Patrick Redmond and Irish National Opera
@rorotoko.com"All around it, bodies move about quietly, like planets orbiting a sun."
Benoît Loiseau on La Borde, an experimental psychiatric clinic.
Out from @yalepress.bsky.social
@rorotoko.com"Who has the words?"
Tarik O'Regan on the raising of Lazarus in his opera Testament, and what it felt like to the people standing at the grave.
@rorotoko.comA century of radical clinics, from Weimar Berlin to New York during AIDS.
Benoît Loiseau on a history written as a letter to his late mother.
Out from @yalepress.bsky.social
@rorotoko.comFrom the archive, 2011:
Mark Lynn Anderson on why deviance was central to the making of American mass culture in the 1920s.
@rorotoko.com"The scene is extremely brief, but what we actually see on screen is not Katharine Ross, but the arm of the film’s director."
Paul Moody on The Stepford Wives.
@rorotoko.comJoanna stabs Bobby, and Bobby does not bleed.
Paul Moody on the scene that sums up the debate about The Stepford Wives.
Photo Credit: Palomar Pictures International/Fadsin Cinema Associates
