Brad Johnson

@ahablives

A part of the Twitter Diaspora. Also run East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, CA - @ebbooksellers.bsky.social

181 Following1,164 Followers4,441 Posts

Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and ahablives.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Brad Johnson@ahablives· 27d

How has the US not yet suffered sanctions for its rank stupidity?

Brad Johnson@ahablives· 28d

I don’t galley brag often, but I’m pretty happy about this one.

Photo of Alexis Shotwell’s forthcoming LIBERATION IS OTHER PEOPLE.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jul 3

He’s such a snoop.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 27

Event announcement from the store newsletter I just sent. I really want you to get a ticket to Thomas Mullaney's discussion of HOW WE DISAPPEAR w/ @tamigraph.bsky.social Kneese at Local Economy on July 9th. It promises to be very good. Do so here: luma.com/o8ar0rxe

In an age when it seems endless, it's easy to forget one of the fundamental, thermodynamic rules of our universe also applies to information. Namely, that accumulation and complexity always mask a more enduring, entropic loss.

Thomas S. Mullaney is a Stanford historian who knows a good deal professionally about information-loss, and with the death of his parents came face to face with it personally. His documenting of life -- one's own, another's, and indeed as a whole -- of life as a mode of information accumulating and unravelling -- as built to disappear -- is as deeply thought as it is surprisingly moving.

Coincidentally, I read his How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton & Co.) almost immediately after Peter N. Miller's considerably denser but no less delightful On Conservation as a Human Science (Princeton University Press). Both Mullaney and Miller present as a core human question: what's really & may yet still be left behind in the ruins of history recent and long past? Our current environmental, social, and political conditions lend an immediacy to what we might otherwise opt to defer.

All this is to say, I'm very excited that we're co-hosting Thomas S. Mullaney with Local Economy on Thursday, July 9th (6-7:30pm). He will be in conversation with Tamara Kneese, whose book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press) provides an ethnographic and historical account of the internet of death.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 18

This book is going to destroy my already destroyed eyes, but I’m keen to check it out.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 17

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 15

I don’t read at work very often, but it’s slow this morning and the estimated taxes are now paid. So …

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 15

Thomas Mullaney’s “How We Disappear” is proving quite good.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 10

….. how ….. comforting

$Flock cameras captured over 600 million license plates in Oakland last year Only a small fraction of the plates were associated with criminal suspects, according to police.$

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 5

So publishers are now just shipping books in paper bags now, huh?

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 5

I don’t think anybody’s walking out of this meeting in a good mood.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· Jun 5

I see we’re really testing the pliability of “celebrity.”

Vanilla Ice Is In, Bret Michaels Is Out:
Trump's Battle for Celebrity
Validation
President Trump has pursued fame his entire adult life. Now in his second term, he is finding how little power he has to force cultural figures to fall in line.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· May 29

Whistling “I gotta be me” in the store.

Brad Johnson@ahablives· May 24

Chiharu Shiota’s “Two Home Countries” exhibition at the S.F. Asian Art Museum is a delight. The play between light and shadow, color and whatever might be linked between, is not subtle, but provocative all the same.