Recent content on The Personal Blog of Emily Gorcenski
Join me this weekend at the Rivanna Area Queer Center for a session on understanding news literacy in the age of algorithmic media. Watch this space for a list of resources and key findings after the session. You are a soldier in an information war. Increasingly, politics are becoming participatory affairs played out in the public sphere through media and social media. Their goal is to command…
A poem for all victims of secret police. Shotguns for the storytellers— They kill the poets first— Or they won’t wait too long— The dictator lives to tell you what abides— The poet dies to tell you what could be. Soon come the truthseekers— It’s your memory that must die first— Flashbangs for the filmographers— Pistols for the protesters— The victor doesn’t write history, he edits. One day this…
Reflections on repatriation, AI, and thriving as the world falls apart. The general consensus seems to be that 2025 sucked, particularly among those who find themselves plugged into politics. There are wars and genocides happening around the world, pandemics (plural) raging, and a moribund economy staggering like a concussed quarterback convincing his coach he can make it one more drive. Amidst…
Charlottesville Tomorrow asked me what I hoped to see over the next 20 years. My answer was informed by my last several years abroad and how cities that grow around diverse communities can thrive.
I was happy to sit down with Awkword to discuss Charlottesville and how the community’s experience under the first Truml administration has given it tools to resist the second.
A post about coming home. Musa Okwonga’s astonishing memoir of the city, In the End, It Was All About Love , describes how Berlin calls her inhabitants home, compelled as if by the gentle contours of some mysterious gradient. I was caught in the well of its gravity years ago, when I first boarded a flight to come here for a conference knowing next to nothing about the city. It makes no sense…
The first part of what I hope to be an ongoing series about repatriating and owning my own data and tech. In this post, I describe how I integrated my own self-hosted calendar solution. Introduction My calendar is a true nightmare. I travel a lot, some of it for my job, some of it for fun, and some of it because I’ve been managing a long distance relationship for years. Traveling a lot means…
Robert Evans invited me to read my poem “The Time of Cowards” on the episode covering Trump’s 2025 inauguration, and I was honored to do so.
A poem of our times originally written as a Bluesky thread It is the time of the coward. It is the age of the liar. And greed, and avarice, and lost boys and a dopamine hit and fractals And velocity and velocity and velocity and go go go don’t stop don’t stop to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability, the parsimony, the hoards hoarded behind the gates the…
We are no longer in a culture war, we are fighting instead an epistemological war, where authoritarians seek to replace process with diktat: why truth is a gradient and not a boolean. Captain Jay Zeamer, Jr., as aviation historian Martin Caidin tells it, was a barely-competent aviator who struggled to earn his pilot wings and fell asleep in the copilot seat during combat missions. Eventually…
I was honored to come on Episode 2 of the new season of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, looking into far-right paramilitary violence plays into anti-trans hate. Have a listen!
I joined Freja with Redox to talk about the state of US politics and white supremacy following Donald Trump’s second election. It’s partly in Danish, but my contributions are in English. Have a listen!
I’ve always wanted to visit Transylvania, the land of my people. Wait… that’s not what that means?? My company’s been changing a lot this year, and one of the impacts of this change was I took on a wonderful team of data scientists and engineers in Romania. I’ve been a big fan of Romania, its culture and its language for the past few years, and so when my colleague…
On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on an unexpected journey of self-discovery. In Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sonntag concludes with an observation that remembrance is an act with ethical weight and, as a corollary, that in the prevention of future suffering it is also…
English novelist D. H. Lawrence’s formerly banned book Women in Love is a timeless and somehow still relevant examinations of the complexities of love and homoeroticism. If I were to list the things I find most boring in the world, somewhere near the top of the list you would find “compulsory heterosexuality” and “English aristocratic drama.” Both of these things are…