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🎵 : Neva Play - Megan thee Stallion
\nEJ Dickson on the sport of online harassment, by NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-20T17:09:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/20/the-sport-of-online-harassment.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Music","Platforms","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/14/discussion-of-eliza-computers-and.html", "content_html": "🎵 : Sci-Fi Wasabi - Cibo Matto
\nDiscussion of ELIZA, computers and people, and how tech mitigates our relationships to ourselves and one another.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-14T11:37:28-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/14/discussion-of-eliza-computers-and.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/gary-indiana-reading-list.html", "title": "1000 Mountains: a Gary, Indiana, reading list", "content_html": "🎵: A Thousand Mountains - Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist
\nYesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway. Since living in Madison, I’ve made some version of that drive more times than I can count. I grew up south of Gary, at the edge of what a colleague called “the Chicago ombré,” and in my twenties my friends and I spent our weekends in The Region, thrifting our way across Lake County and hitting 18+ hip hop clubs in East Chicago. (King Von measured the same gradient from the city side in “Took Her to the O.”) To many, Gary is the city you drive through on the way to somewhere else.
\nThe Skyway has a long political history: Chicago built it in 1958 with revenue bonds, then the bonds defaulted in 1963, and the city spent the next few decades catching up on deferred maintenance, according to Louise Nelson Dyble’s history of the road. In 2005, the Daley administration leased it for 99 years to Cintra and Macquarie for $1.83 billion, making it the first existing toll road in the country to be privatized. Eleven years later, the consortium sold the lease to three Canadian pension funds for $2.8 billion. The crossing now costs $8.10 in a car, and CBS Chicago reports that tolls have gone up more than 200 percent since the lease, about three and a half times the rate of inflation.
\nIndiana saw the incentives in this arrangement and followed along. In 2006, then-governor Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana Toll Road to the same Macquarie-Cintra group for 75 years and $3.8 billion, and he used the money to pay for Major Moves, his statewide highway program. Stateline’s 2012 retrospective called the lease one of the most divisive things Daniels did as governor. The bill passed without a single House Democrat, and the Region hated it. At a town hall in Crown Point, one resident told Daniels the deal amounted to taxation without representation. The operator went into Chapter 11 in 2014, and an Australian fund bought the lease the next year for $5.7 billion. A big share of the original money built I-69 between Evansville and the Crane Naval Base, at the other end of the state. When Eric Holcomb later approved a truck toll hike in exchange for another $1 billion, he had to deny in public that the Region was once again paying for highways its drivers would never use.
\nThe state keeps the paperwork on deals like these. The Indiana State Archives opened a new downtown building in Indianapolis on Thursday after 25 years in a “temporary” warehouse on East 30th Street, a former RCA record-stamping plant whose roof leaked partly because people shot holes in it. An old combination safe in the new building holds the state’s original constitutions, Jim Jones’s church incorporation papers, and Donald Trump’s application for a casino in Gary. Upstairs, a conservator expects to spend four to six weeks piecing together a Porter County survey map that had broken into fragments. The reading room is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, and the staff asks you to make an appointment so they can pull the boxes before you arrive.
\nGary has been on the wrong end of these deals since before it had a name. Paige Williams’s New Yorker piece on Gary and U.S. Steel asks whether a company town once called “the most miserable city in America” can remake itself. U.S. Steel founded Gary in 1906 to house the workers for its mills, and in 1920 Carl Sandburg published a poem about how the people running the place saw those workers.
\nFreddie Gibbs grew up on Gary’s east side, and Jeff Weiss has profiled him twice. The 2021 profile in The Ringer catches Gibbs around his Grammy nomination for Alfredo and opens on a 2009 visit to his Van Nuys apartment, where Gibbs told Weiss that robbing freight trains was a popular hobby back home. Weiss’s earlier piece, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, adds that one of Gibbs’s teachers got fired for robbing them too.
\n(Weiss, bless him, professes not to understand the rabbit metaphor present throughout Gibbs’ work, yet confidently persists.)
\nGibbs’s father, Warren Tipton, spent about twenty years on the Gary police force and later sang with the Chi-Lites. He died in May, and AllHipHop’s obituary places him in the same Gary music scene that produced the Jacksons. That detail stuck with me because my ex-father-in-law was a police officer and chief of police downstate during the same years, and also played drums in a local band. Jamelle Bouie has historically described police departments as “jobs for the boys,” a steady public paycheck handed to working-class men, and that fits both of their careers better than anything about their relationships to law and order. In towns where the mills were shedding jobs, a badge was one of the few paychecks that came with a pension, and a man who could sing still needed that safety net.
\nPolicing in the Region has much uglier chapters than that. The Chicago Sun-Times has spent years covering the federal case against the Sin City Deciples, a motorcycle club founded in Gary in 1967. One member admitted he worked as a Gary police chaplain while killing two men, one of them the son of a former Gary police chief. The Chicago Reader’s Tiger King of the Midwest profiles Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper, who ran a tattoo shop called the Badlands with Bengal tigers in cages next to the chairs. Tattooing was illegal in Indiana then, and Cooper’s lawyer reportedly steered him to Gary because the police had bigger problems than a tattoo shop — as long as it paid its taxes. Media Burn has raw footage of Cooper setting a leashed tiger on a pool table while his wife runs through the rest of their animals, which included a grizzly bear and a baboon. In the video, Lady Cooper recommends taking the animals out in public, to the grocery store, socializing them on the locals.
\nAnderson went through the same collapse with auto parts. General Motors moved in during the 1920s and eventually ran two divisions there, Delco-Remy for electrical systems and Guide Lamp for headlights. By the time Jon Alpert made Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana for HBO in 2008, a town that once had 33,000 GM jobs had empty factories and shuttered stores, and what was left of it went to the Anderson Speedway every Friday night. The Herald Bulletin caught up with one of the film’s drivers, Sammy Hawkins, as he flew home from the New York premiere to a Firestone job in Noblesville that he expected to lose. His line in the film is that Anderson doesn’t make cars anymore, but it can still race them and wreck them.
\nMusic in Gary started in the mills. Joe Jackson ran a crane and played guitar in a band called the Falcons, which never got a record deal, so he kept the mill job and trained his sons into the Jackson 5 instead. Their first contract came from Steeltown Records, a Gary label, in 1967, and “Big Boy” was a local hit before Motown signed them.
\nDetroit turned its losses into techno. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson learned Kraftwerk and Parliament from a late-night DJ called the Electrifyin’ Mojo, and by 1987 more than half of Detroit’s manufacturing, retail, and wholesale base was gone, as SPIN reported in 1998. Midstory’s Built to Boom traces the line from the assembly plants through Motown to techno, and May describes sampling industrial noise, traffic, and construction into his tracks.
\nThe techno ran straight into the rap Jorjiana grew up on. NPR’s piece on how Detroit and Flint became havens for rap dark horses credits the producer Helluva with a “basement sound” of ominous pianos and synth stabs, which he built by crossing West Coast gangsta rap with Detroit techno, and it describes the Flint rappers as a crew of flippant, vulgar jokers. Flintside’s history of the Flint scene shows how a co-sign from Detroit’s Peezy lifted Rio Da Yung OG and everyone around him. Lil Yachty spent years showing up on Michigan records, and he later vouched for Jorjiana too.
\nJorjiana is 21, and a single mom, and from Michigan City, just down the shore from Gary. The Times of Northwest Indiana profiled her recently after “ILBB2” took off, and her Complex interview covers a childhood spent moving between relatives while her parents struggled with addiction, bouncing through the greater area in foster care. By her account, her music career started with screwing around with her friends around town. She and her friends were bored during the pandemic, so they freestyled in her car, and she posted the results, doing actual numbers. She told Justin Moran that her friends talked her into cross-posting the TikTok clips to Instagram, which she barely used, and that’s where the A&Rs found her. At the time she didn’t know what an A&R was. In a clip Complex posted, she admits she doesn’t know who Freddie Gibbs is either, so what ties her to Gary is the shoreline more than any influence. She should get familiar with his catalog (and a metronome!).
\nPlenty of good bands started as friends goofing off: Devo began as a satirical art project at Kent State, and the Maels studied graphic design and film at UCLA before Sparks. Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers spends a lot of time on how they built their act for Top of the Pops closeups. Both bands treated the dominant screen of their time as part of the instrument. Jorjiana’s screen is the short-form feed, and I’ve been watching her work it for the last year or so: snippets of songs previewed, clips pushed to every platform, a freestyle on On The Radar at the end of 2024 that brought more than a dozen labels calling, a GloRilla remix, and co-sign from Lil Yachty. Caitlin Clark, slanted.
\nIf you want to know what Gary is doing now, read Capital B Gary, which covers the city more consistently than anyone else. Start with their feature on Koney King, a Broadway diner that has been serving chili for more than a century, and then look through their 2024 year in photos, which has residents cleaning up parks on the East Side and crowds on the beach for the eclipse.
\n
I, myself, had a run-in with a white supremacist Indiana biker gang in my twenties in West Lafayette, also connected to a money-laundering tattoo shop. Someday I’ll commit the story to paper.
\nOther notes: Akron went through its own version a decade later, with rubber instead of steel. Midstory’s history of how Akron became “the new Liverpool” describes Devo, Tin Huey, the Bizarros, and the Rubber City Rebels as kids from factory families trying not to follow their fathers into the plants. The scene got its home during one of the longest rubber workers’ strikes in the city’s history, when the Rubber City Rebels took over a rubber workers’ bar called the Crypt, as PBS Western Reserve tells it in It’s Everything, and Then It’s Gone. Chris Smith’s 2024 Devo documentary picks up the story from Kent State and follows the band into the early days of MTV.
\nA recent article on the Indiana Quaker community’s place in the Underground Railroad.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T10:32:06-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/gary-indiana-reading-list.html", "tags": ["Music","Madison","Midwest","Platforms","Photos","Podcasts","Digital Rhetoric","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/in-honor-of-dolly-rest.html", "content_html": "In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:
\nI listened to two great podcasts this week exploring the tangle of human/AI relationships. In “Computer Love,” the guests explore whether these relationships are good for us, and in “Your AI Companion Doesn’t Love You,” they explore the technical and business implications of these relationships. Both of these feature podcaster and writer Bridget Todd, who is promoting her new book “Love at First Prompt.” As of today, about 1 in 5 young people in the U.S. have asked a chatbot for mental health advice, and 1 in 5 high schoolers have had a romantic AI relationship.
\nNote: Todd’s (excellent) podcast title is a reference to Rule 30 of the internet.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-25T08:28:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/25/computer-love.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI","Gender","AI in Practice","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/20/parents-wanting-stakes-lower-than.html", "content_html": "Parents wanting stakes lower than a smartphone: consider a kid-friendly Wi-Fi landline, which looks and works like an old corded phone but runs over your internet connection, giving kids the independence to get connected safely. Alternatively, get a VOIP phone through your ISP for ~$10/mo.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-20T13:01:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/20/parents-wanting-stakes-lower-than.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Podcasts","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/30/amazon-has-launched-a-new.html", "content_html": "“Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two AI ‘hosts’ discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-30T10:46:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/30/amazon-has-launched-a-new.html", "tags": ["AI","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/21/mindy-seu-on-its-been.html", "content_html": "Mindy Seu on It’s Been a Minute talking about the history of women on the internet.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-21T07:35:38-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/21/mindy-seu-on-its-been.html", "tags": ["Gender","Podcasts","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/10/taste-the-music-is-a.html", "content_html": "Taste the Music is a new audio series exploring why artists are driven to create. The first episode features storytelling and songwriting by friend of the blog Whitney Mann, where she chronicles her experience getting “the yips” onstage, and how she worked through it and picked up her guitar again.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-10T15:34:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/10/taste-the-music-is-a.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Music","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/30/several-years-ago-nprs-code.html", "content_html": "Several years ago, NPR’s Code Switch did a great episode on Black Republicans and how they come to their politics. A good listen on partisan politics and how they intersect with complex identities and life experiences.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-30T18:40:28-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/30/several-years-ago-nprs-code.html", "tags": ["Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/15/podcast-the-kids-in-ice.html", "content_html": "Podcast: The kids in ICE detention.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-15T15:49:37-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/15/podcast-the-kids-in-ice.html", "tags": ["Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/a-note-on-ezra-klein.html", "content_html": "A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are overwhelmingly male and concentrated in a few institutions, and generally assert the inevitability of disruptive AI as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Anthropic and others are anticipating that career ladders where women are concentrated will be impacted, some claiming professional women’s jobs will dry up or disappear entirely.
\nI looked over his podcast guests for the last year and noticed that among his tech-focused guests, almost all white, almost all men, almost none of them are women. A rough count of eight podcasts (nine if you stretch) with accompanying commentary only produced two women, both economists. Klein’s brand is the guy who does the reading, the big ideas guy. So it’s worth asking what he’s reading and whose ideas he considers big. While he probably wouldn’t disagree with Gebru or Crawford or Noble on the substance, his current body of commentary is pulled toward the perspectives of people who have the most to gain from the technology’s expansion and the least exposure to its costs.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T20:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/07/a-note-on-ezra-klein.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Platforms","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/05/code-switch-on-the-gentrification.html", "content_html": "NPR’s Code Switch on the gentrification of the Internet.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-05T08:41:07-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/05/code-switch-on-the-gentrification.html", "tags": ["Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/ryan-broderick-is-currently-my.html", "content_html": "Ryan Broderick is currently my fav reporter on the Internet culture beat, and on this podcast he’s talking about Epstein and why he was interested in putting his resources to developing the early internet (spoiler: for crimes).
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-04T08:40:43-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/04/ryan-broderick-is-currently-my.html", "tags": ["Tech","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/21/my-friend-dave-bangert-has.html", "content_html": "My friend Dave Bangert has been a Midwestern reporter for thirty years, and began his own newsletter project after layoffs and mergers emptied his local newsroom. Now his 8000 subscriber project is a major influence in a Big Ten town that otherwise has a weak media market. In this podcast he talks about how it all works, what we lose as legacy media dries up, and what it means when your readers know exactly who you are, and you run into them in the produce aisle.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-21T11:16:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/21/my-friend-dave-bangert-has.html", "tags": ["Midwest","Platforms","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/06/tagging-this-plain-language-definition.html", "content_html": "Tagging this plain language definition for later: “platforms… are any space or any institution that brings together buyers and sellers, speakers and listeners.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-06T10:15:13-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/06/tagging-this-plain-language-definition.html", "tags": ["Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/02/on-the-media-spends-an.html", "content_html": "On the Media spends an hour exploring the media strategy behind the calls for debate. Tl;dr: controversy extends unpopular ideas much further than they would reach organically on their own.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-02T15:38:43-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/02/on-the-media-spends-an.html", "tags": ["Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/21/i-am-progames-and-gaming.html", "content_html": "I am pro-games and gaming (and partake in gaming myself), and both of my kids had a generally positive experience on various gaming platforms over the years, but stuff like this still gives me pause.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-21T09:47:19-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/21/i-am-progames-and-gaming.html", "tags": ["Podcasts","Digital Rhetoric","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/16/at-the-nail-salon-where.html", "content_html": "At the nail salon where a woman is telling her very intrigued mother about podcasts. “You can listen to them anywhere! In the car, while you’re gardening.”
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-16T11:49:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/16/at-the-nail-salon-where.html", "tags": ["Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/12/bookmarking-this-media-podcast-specifically.html", "content_html": "Bookmarking this 404 media podcast specifically because it discusses how librarians are navigating the rise of AI.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-12T07:54:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/12/bookmarking-this-media-podcast-specifically.html", "tags": ["AI","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/10/why-tim-bernerslee-still-believes.html", "content_html": "Why Tim Berners-Lee still believes in the web | The Verge
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-11-10T21:44:29-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/10/why-tim-bernerslee-still-believes.html", "tags": ["Podcasts","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/08/practicing-pluralism-in-risky-spaces.html", "title": "Practicing pluralism in risky spaces ", "content_html": "You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days, the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. So that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for, and in fact, we need to rebuild.
\n
While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!) spaces. She’s welcome in my foxhole anytime.
\nI appreciate this oral history project by LGM because the articulation of our processes then (before automation) provides a lot of instruction about how to organize and think about communication outside of increasingly toxic and irresponsible social platforms today. One idea that is relevant today is around pluralism. In our case, we practiced pluralism on subjects and perspectives within a defined domain, “feminism.” In practice, making it work before true automation meant we lived with a lot of decision points around moderating a raucous community. Back then, we had our CMS and set up a list of community expectations, iterating as we went, then let the community rip. Collectively, this approach created a robust and vibrant interactive community of peers and moved our interests forward as a cohort. Between her interview, where she talks through the decision points we faced, and mine, where I talk more about the tools and their limitations, there is a lot for people who want to organize people digitally while thinking outside of the algorithm.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-08T13:09:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/08/practicing-pluralism-in-risky-spaces.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Gender","Platforms","Podcasts","Essays","Blog History"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/03/12/a-couple-of.html", "content_html": "A couple of years ago I was featured on the LGM podcast, as a speaker on the oral history of the blogosphere. Posting it here for posterity: www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/07/o…
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-12T09:29:50-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/03/12/a-couple-of.html", "tags": ["Podcasts","Blog History"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/02/20/the-new-provost.html", "content_html": "The new provost is an interesting person and an ultra-charismatic speaker, which makes for a p good podcast. madison.citycast.fm/podcasts/…
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-20T19:36:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/02/20/the-new-provost.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Madison","Midwest","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/01/26/the-latest-youre-wrong-about.html", "content_html": "The latest You’re Wrong About podcast about the pro-life movement is an excellent primer for anyone who knows a little but doesn’t feel like an expert. Covers the history of the movement, where they came from ideologically, how they organize and why it’s effective. yourewrongabout.com
\n", "date_published": "2024-01-26T11:30:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/01/26/the-latest-youre-wrong-about.html", "tags": ["Gender","Podcasts"] } ] }