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jordanrbrower.bsky.social

@jordanrbrower.bsky.social
113 followers 130 following 152 posts
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
By total happenstance, today happens to be the day that, in my Introduction to Film course, I lecture on THE JAZZ SINGER 😵‍💫
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Reposted by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social
J.D. Connor @jdconnor.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
CFP: Post45's Special Issue Why 45? Deadline EXTENDED: 8/31 submissions.post45.org/journal/CFP/...
submissions.post45.org
Why45? (or Why68?) | Post45 Journal Submissions
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
”HI, I’m the rope swing loop you got your foot caught in at the Connecticut River in Hadley, MA on your 21st birthday!”
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Grateful to American Literary History for reviewing CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD, AMERICAN MODERNISM. Nice to see it called “ambitious, smart, and complex,” and to have it taken to task for the “endless to return allegory as a mode of examination.” academic.oup.com/alh/article/...
academic.oup.com
Jordan Brower, Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System
Anne Morey; Jordan Brower, Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System, American Literary History, Volume 38, Issue 3,
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Does the Fed still put out these rad zines? These must be from ca. 2002 (when I did the Fed Challenge in high school).
Zine published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, featuring three totally boss teens surrounded by images of financial institutions Zine published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York titled “Too Much, Too Little,” about the origins of the Fed. Image presents a retrofuturistic depiction of a Time Machine hurtling through space
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Damn LinkedIn seems like a good place to find truly misanthropic shit
I ordered a sandwich today through DoorDash and my dasher reached out saying she was en route but needed to get gas. She then called 10 min later. She had run out of gas on the way to get gas
. While I waited for her, l used
Claude to help me make a haiku.
I cannot stop laughing.
If you have any
goofy things that have happened today, I encourage you to make a haiku!

The haiku:
Angelica's car
sighs empty just past the turn—
my Jimmy John's waits
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
professional: alt text opts for clarity over the ready joke (”smooth criminal”)
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
The NBA finals is illuminating the difference between the nepo baby and the legacy admit
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
After some ISBN-related confusion, the discount code BROWER26 now works for the paperback edition of CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD, AMERICAN MODERNISM.
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Some of the best cinematography of the year at the end of Game 3
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
We're in a bad way when Netflix Film's chairman makes a clear, canny, and ballsy riff on Norma Desmond's famous line—"I am big; it's the pictures that got small"—and the profile writer can't or won't make the observation. Is this the Failing New York Times I've heard about?
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
As or more ironic is the fact that the report—which I’ll assume is written in good faith, though some howlers in there that suggest otherwise—is handicapped by its inability to be more objective by dilating its scope beyond the narrow ideological framing of Vanderbilt’s charge. (Cf p. 13 et al)
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
did the two losses come when MJ was suspended for punching Isiah in practice?
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Someone will have to confirm this for me since I'm too scared to see it
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Results of the physical are in; doin great
Immortan Joe preparing his spoiled body for presentation in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
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Reposted by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social
David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Every sport has gotten better since I was a kid, which makes sense because I am old. But the NBA occasionally just rolls out whole new types of guys. Wemby and Holmgren are totally new, but also Dylan Harper is a wider/faster type of guy. Alex Caruso is an old type of guy, but does new stuff.
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Happy springtime news: Cambridge UP has decided to release my book CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD, AMERICAN MODERNISM in paperback. The price is down to $45 from the ungodly $110 hardcover. The release is set for April 23, but preordering is open. The code BROWER26 should provide 20% off. tinyurl.com/4543uvj2
tinyurl.com
Classical Hollywood, American Modernism | Cambridge University Press & Assessment
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
An object lesson in the difference between postmodernism and whatever we have now, brought to you by incels
Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, resisting Bonnie Parker's advances by saying "I never saw no percentage in it."The influencer Clavicular explaining his lack of interest in dating, saying "Like where's the ROI?"
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
For the 20th anniversary of Henry Jenkins's CONVERGENCE CULTURE, some smart people and I are organizing "Media Convergences Since the Sixties," a seminar at ASAP/17 (Madison, WI, Oct 15-17). Propose papers here. We're looking forward to converging with you! asap17.exordo.com/panels/35/co...
Text of "Media Convergences since the Sixties" seminar at ASAP/17, image one of three.Text of "Media Convergences since the Sixties" seminar at ASAP/17, image two of three.Text of "Media Convergences since the Sixties" seminar at ASAP/17, image three of three.
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Gen Z slang really is inscrutable
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Behold, unearthed from a dark corner of my childhood bedroom: A liquid antacid bottle filled exclusively with nickels. If this were in Marty Supreme it would have been called antisemitic
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Would also have accepted “a warning shot”
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
The same old story
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Late for thanksgiving, too early for Christmas, but nonetheless: I owe my modest career and, as importantly, my belief in the value in and pleasure of thinking intensely about even the most ostensibly negligible of objects to this confirmed sicko
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Not the biggest news of the day, but maybe more surprising
Ariana Grande tells Adam Sandler that "The Waterboy" is "so gut-wrenching"
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
A beautiful book with which to take one's time
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
With apologies to Max and Theodor…
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Mastermind:5 Easy Pieces::Meek’s Cutoff:Stagecoach
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
H. N. Lukes usefully frames "Classical Hollywood, American Modernism" as "a version of a villain’s 'origin story' that Marvel has recently made so much of by recycling its own IP" in the most recent issue of @mmodernity.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
muse.jhu.edu
Project MUSE - <i>Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System</i> by Jordan Brower (review)
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
NYT piloting troll headlines www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/b...
nytimes.com
‘One Battle After Another’ Ticket Sales Are Solid (With an Asterisk)
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Reposted by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social
Elizabeth Alsop @elizabethalsop.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
See below for a post-Emmys reading list, courtesy of the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social! Featuring brilliant essays on THE PITT (by @charlotteerosen.bsky.social), WHITE LOTUS (by @cinementalist.bsky.social) & SEVERANCE (by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social) (plus something partly sorta on THE STUDIO by me)
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
David Ellison: Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further. Ghost of Zukor: Mark me.
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Dear Dr. Swift, I'm sorry to inform you that, due to historic financial pressures, your position has been eliminated. This is by no means a reflection on your talent in the classroom; I know that you have been very popular with students. Best wishes, Associate Dean
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
Severance earned an industry-leading 27 Emmy nominations. Why has it worked so well? In part because it sustained its put-on from the first episode to “Cold Harbor,” the justly-celebrated Season 2 finale
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
"Severance’s most compelling excess is an excess of genre: the neo-noir conspiracy sits alongside a remarriage comedy that is itself internally divided and doomed to failure."
Composite of stills from Severance, Apple TV+, and The Conversation, Paramount Pictures
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
My alternate title was "The Offness," in homage to Teddy Blanks, who designed the show's typography: “The production design in Severance is highly indebted to that clean, modernist ’60s corporate look, but there’s something ‘off’ about it.... The type needed to be the same way.”
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
In time for the end of the fiscal year, I took account of Severance for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...
lareviewofbooks.org
The Put-On | Los Angeles Review of Books
Jordan Brower considers the abjuring of depth undertaken by the Apple TV+ series “Severance.”
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Looks like I was on to something in “A24’s Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt” tinyurl.com/yrxxza6t
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
My take on Michael Szalay’s impressive “Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television,” is out today in the ALH Review academic.oup.com/alh/article/...
academic.oup.com
Michael Szalay, Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television
Jordan Brower; Michael Szalay, Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television, American Literary History, Volume 37, Issue 2, 1 Ma
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
At long last, “A24’s Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt” is now out with @jcmsjournal.bsky.social quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/i...
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Coming soon in @jcmsjournal.bsky.social, "A24's Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt."
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Reposted by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social
jefflawcdm.bsky.social @jefflawcdm.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Speaking today at the University of Kentucky on anti-Trumpism. Starting with Carlos Manuel Álvarez's line, "To see half of the nation trying to annihilate Trump is like watching a body attempting to get rid of its shadow.” Grateful to my old friend @jordanrbrower.bsky.social for the invitation!
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
Proud of my colleague Emily Shortslef, winner of @universityofky.bsky.social's College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award! Pleased, too, that I've received the prize for talking loudly in big rooms (Excellence in Teaching Large Courses Award).
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Who will write "The Idea of Order at Mar-a-Lago"?
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
First birthday card came in!
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
What a pleasure to be understood! Thanks @fuscowrites.bsky.social for the kind and careful reading scalar.usc.edu/works/the-sp...
scalar.usc.edu
The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945: Review | Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System
Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System. By Jordan Brower. Cambridge University Press, 2024. 246 pp. $110.00 (cloth); $110.00 (e-book).Reviewed by Katherine Fu...
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Anticipating several panels along the lines of "How to get to Dunkies on the way To the Lighthouse"
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Reposted by @jordanrbrower.bsky.social
J.D. Connor @jdconnor.bsky.social · 03/06/2024
The CFP for the USC Cinema & Media Studies grad conference "Infrastructure and Abstraction" is now live. It is always great. Please circulate widely. The Alt Text is a mess, sorry.
IRST FORUM CONFERENCE 2024 – CALL FOR PROPOSALS
DIVISION OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 27TH AND 28TH
Infrastructure and Abstraction
“The immaterial has become… immaterial.”
– Lord Cutler Beckett, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
A turn to infrastructure in media studies has drawn attention to important lines of inquiry about
materiality, environments, elemental media, and infrastructures’ frequent entanglements with
capitalist and colonialist projects. But this turn, at times, also risks occluding no less important
questions about the work of abstraction in media and adjacent considerations of representation,
affect, and the ephemeral. Such thinking reduces the real to the material and renders abstraction
immaterial. For instance, Melody Jue’s powerful emphasis on the milieu-specificity of thought,
which proceeds via a submersion of media studies into the ocean, turns on the abjection of
abstraction. For her, media studies’ usual definipowers of abstractions rather than deriding them for their immateriality; indeed, it retools our
very understanding of what does and does not count as material, as well as the value we accord
to materiality. Kinder expands our sense of what counts as infrastructure; Marks offers a way of
affirming images as real and worldly; both turn on fundamental transvaluations of materiality
and immateriality, concretion and abstraction. These and other media studies scholars working
along similar lines demonstrate just some of the ways that the discipline can rework the
coordinates of infrastructure and abstraction to highly generative ends.
The organizing committee of the 2024 First Forum Conference invites papers and creative
projects from graduate students that navigate generative oppositions between infrastructure and
abstraction as they relate to a wide range of media objects and sites of mediation. We encourage
submissions that address the unstable borders between these two concepts, perhap❑ Digital environments;
interactivity
❑ Elemental media
❑ Infrastructure’s promise of
futurity
❑ Indexicality and abstraction
❑ Abstraction and value
❑ Vernacular modernism
❑ Place-based knowledge and
abstractions/appropriations
thereof
Please submit an abstract (-300 words) and a short biography (-150 words). Conference
presentations will be 15-20 minutes. Applicants must submit their materials by July 14, 2024
to firstforumgradconference@gmail.com. Please include “Name + First Forum 2024
Submission” in the subject line. Alongside traditional academic papers, we welcome non-
traditional projects, including but not limited to video essays, short films, and art exhibitions.
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 19/03/2024
Outstanding review-essay by Ellen Song about working-class Asian American life in contemporary film and television. lareviewofbooks.org/article/they...
lareviewofbooks.org
They Were Made to Choose Sides: On Eunice Lau’s “A-Town Boyz” | Los Angeles Review of Books
Ellen Song looks at Eunice Lau’s documentary “A-Town Boyz” in the context of contemporary Asian American representation....
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jordanrbrower.bsky.social @jordanrbrower.bsky.social · 10/02/2024
The book would have been unthinkable without the dozens of hours in J.D.'s seminars and scores more in his office. If nothing else, it's a testament to good mentorship.
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