Tracing the spectacular within the humdrum of the built environment
“Whether legal geography will ever embrace an object-oriented post-humanism to any significant extent (and thus dwell upon the relationship between Latour’s chairs and tables rather than upon their co-option– alongside the texts and officials he glimpsed at work there– in essentially human projects) remains to be seen. Yet there are challenging and interesting projects if [ ]
The pavement and the road are crowded with purchasers and street sellers. The housewife in her thick shawl, with the market-basket on her arm, walks slowly on, stopping now to look at the stall of caps, and now a cheapen a bunch of greens. Little boys, holding three or four onions in their hand, creep [ ]
When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to belive that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and [ ]
But even as I try to apply sweeping reductive principles to the manner in which buildings and cities affect us, I can still sometimes feel the trembling legs of the six-year-old version of me, reminding me that reducing the meaning of a piece of architecture to a set of equations will always cause us to [ ]
Over the course of this parliament, the government is determined to honour the commitments made in our manifesto and do what is necessary to finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end. Matthew Pennycook, Minsiter of State for Housing and Planning, House of Commons Statement, 21-11-24 https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-11-21/hcws244 The Journal of…
And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special wariness of others. Erving Goffman (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Vintage Books: New York p.229 I like reading people [ ]
Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives. Albert Einstein, speaking a few [ ]
New tasks emerge where machines reach their limits — in empathy, judgment, creativity, and hope .Automation scales output; augmentation scales intelligence. http://www.futureneers.io/blog, 8/11/25 One of the small pleasures of rewatching Breaking Bad is noticing, again and again, how oddly it is filmed. Not just the obvious bravura sequences—the desert vistas, the meth-lab montages, the moral rot…
“It is time to address the places of law and ask: How and why does place matter in legal geographical scholarship? What can be found beyond the generic legal places? And What are the unexplored or underused potentials of place in legal geography?” Päivi Kymäläinen (2025) ‘Legal Geography II: The possibilities and disruptions of place’, [ ]
“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.” James Joyce (1914) Dubliners He s done it again. My son s lastest YouTube video essay ploughs furrows that I ve always been ruminating upon myself throughout my adult life. This time he s documented the obsessive journalling of Robert Shields, a Mid Western, [ ]