I speak with Phil Alvin of The Blasters, a roots-rock icon turned mathematician/AI researcher, for the Santa Cruz Weekly:

There are certain stereotypes associated with folks who turn out muscular, blues-inflected roots rock as the Blasters do. These stereotypes converge around the vision of the roadhouse, where boozy weekend warriors escape to play sturdy late-model rock & roll like their lives depended on it. Blasters frontman Phil Alvin defies such stereotypes, having maintained a notable musical career while also working in mathematical semantics—two fascinations that have often proven difficult to reconcile.

Read the rest at the Santa Cruz Weekly

A new article for Shareable about transmedia fiction, a trend towards social media becoming its own publishing medium, or even a literary form itself. I interview Laird Harrison about his Children of a Future Age project, a hybrid of a traditional novel and a blog, and Jesus Angel Garcia about his modern noir badbadbad, a novel that is being teased across various social media.

Read the rest on Shareable

For the AV Club Chicago, I interview singer-songwriter David Singer about his new album Arrows, scoring the Tony-award-winning play August: Osage County, recording psych-rock for an emo label, and the end of the Intonation Music Festival:

They are lifestyle-marketing events. I’ve had very few musical epiphanies at events like that—20,000 teenagers standing on a baseball diamond is not the ideal way to consume music, and I don’t want to spend six months of my life making that happen.

Read the rest at the AV Club.

A review of Clay Shirky’s fascinating new book Cognitive Surplus for Shareable:

Upon the release of his divisive 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky was besieged by media professionals: “what will happen to our careers in the brave new world of amateur media?” they asked. As a struggling freelance writer, I empathize. But as Shirky argues in his latest book Cognitive Surplus, that’s not the crucial question before us. In fact, the problem he poses is so critical, it’s counterproductive to approach this book from a defensive point of view. Shirky is concerned with a much more fundamental societal challenge: will we harness the publishing, sharing and collaboration innovations the internet offers to enrich the commons, or settle for Facebook updates and lolcats?

Read the entire review here

A preview of novelist/Rumpus contributor Joshua Mohr’s Termite Parade book release party for the SF Weekly:

A fresh take on the Bukowskian milieu of dirtbags, drunks, and drifters is rare, but Joshua Mohr accomplished it with his debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me. More improbably, O, The Oprah Magazine named it one of the best books of the year. Credit Mohr’s voice for bridging these two seemingly irreconcilable extremes.

My friends in San Francisco, I am now telling you what events you should attend, for the SF Weekly. My first calendar preview runs in this week’s issue, for a discussion featuring novelist Ben Greenman at City Lights Books. Should be a good event; check out the details and the preview here.

A profile for the Santa Cruz Weekly on former Santa Cruz resident Emily Jane White, whose sophomore album, Victorian America, is excellent:

There’s a unique confidence to Emily Jane White’s songwriting: it’s at once sympathetic and tough-minded, reflective and unsentimental. Her work has been described as folk, which is reductive, considering how orchestrated her full-band arrangements are. While the music creates a contemplative space reminiscent of folk, White’s subject matter and musical touchstones transcend the woman-with-acoustic-guitar label that is inevitably applied to women with acoustic guitars, whether or not it fits.

Read the article at santacruz.com

An essay for Utne Reader about what independent publishers can learn about Apple’s iBooks store from the experiences of App Store developers and independent music labels:

…as I navigate the iBooks store and learn about the submission process, I’m concerned that independent publishers will suffer many of the same issues that App Store developers have faced. 150,000 iPhone applications have been released in the App Store since 2008. And for some of those developers, the App Store has been a goldmine: there are many apocryphal stories about coders toiling in their basements in off hours, building their own successful app business. But for every success story, there are countless developers whose work is buried deep in the App Store, never to surface. After a few days with iBooks , which borrows much from the App Store in organization and interface, I have to wonder: will this new platform empower independent and self-publishers, or will they similarly be hidden in the dark recesses of an online store?

Read it at Utne Reader

An essay I wrote for Shareable.net about Goodreads and social networking for bookworms:

You can’t go a day without someone declaring that the book is dead, whether at the hand of the Kindle, the iPad, or social media. And while those technologies are certainly vying for attention with the printed book, a lot of social media users still read them–and are even using social media to complement their reading.

Read the full essay here

I wrote the cover story for the Spring 2010 issue of Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine. The feature documents two Columbia professors who are using video games to approach social issues, in very different ways. Professor David Gerden’s CONSTRUCT project attempts to bridge bleeding-edge video game research and behavioral science, while Mindy Faber’s Open Youth Projects utilizes gaming as a tool for community outreach:

“This is like the quarter-million-dollar table,” says Columbia professor David Gerding, sitting in front of a modest conference table outfitted with six laptops that are connected to optical sensors. As Gerding speaks, an avatar of his face appears on the laptop screen before him. A click of a button, and beams of light appear to radiate from the eyes of his digital self. “It’s detecting the iris. Can you see the laser beams coming out of my eyes? It’s like Blade Runner!”

In a modest conference room in Columbia College’s Department of Interactive Arts and Media (IAM), we’ve stepped into what could pass as a set from the ’80s sci-fi classic. It’s a futuristic space where individuals interact on screen as small sensors track their eye movements, pupil dilation, and even facial expressions, all in the service of teaching machines to understand how people communicate and collaborate with one another.

Read the entire article at the DEMO site.

Photo by Drew Reynolds